When Love Looks Faded

We will be ten years this summer and the day of hearts and love is now upon us. I can’t untangle it all. I can’t get through his birthday anymore without crying out a mess all over the kitchen. My man’s birthday, the day we made him, when his short life began. And now St. Valentine’s Day, the day before I found out he was living inside of me. A seed newly planted and all seemed love and hope and our union flowed out easy into children and fruitfullness. Our bodies young and dreams still fresh. Falling easy into sheets and running fast even on the cliff’s edge.

And where are we now? Groping about in the dusk for the hand we used to hold sure? Still his smell is like home and and I know every inch of his arms, strong shoulders holding us up. I grasp the three, boy’s bodies strong as spring plants, holding onto what we’ve made, what we’ve been given. Our glue and still they threaten to swallow us up, to make us into only mom and dad, without a trace of us… Don’t look at me like that, don’t pretend you don’t know. If you say you have walked through years with a lover by your side without once knowing these days, these thoughts – I don’t believe you. I don’t.

But everyone maintains perfection and so I hide my grief, my passion, convinced it’s an indulgence, an inconvenience. (til it spills out ugly) Selfish at best, shameful at worst. Do you know this? What lies deep in your heart, a longing, a wound? Why don’t we offer it up in beauty? I regret the days gone by of simple color in the sun. I draw back when I see the shadows lengthen and fret about what will come. Until I hear other’s stories, flip through artist’s photos… challenges met, beauty unfolded, black and white prints, powerful images. The fight, the argument of dark and light holds more power, more passion than any breezy sunny day. Chiraoscuro, the play of light and dark – art school term, 90’s song – a way of life?

If you truly have not yet met the storm, I do not wish it on you, but it will come… and I tremble to think of other’s battle’s so much more fierce than mine. As I sink into shades of black and white, the children they paint my days, splashed violently with life that even color can’t contain. Until finally I am surprised by slivers of sunshine peeking through the grey, slanting through window panes and onto white sheets. Glimmers of fire smoothing onto skin holding on for dear life, prayers whispered for peace. I see the light rise and I realize the grey is not dusk but dawn, eternal dawn and the Son has come into our shameful midst. He has come to knit our hearts back together and I wish I could silence my tongue and surrender my heart and lay down my body once and for all.

I can’t, but He has.

And so I hold the hand of my friend, my lover. Never to let go. I drink in the sweet smell of boyhood alive in our home. I cry and laugh and try not to screw it all up and cry and laugh some more when I do. And I thank God for bleeding hands and broken bodies and how He knows all my pain and foolishness and will not abandon me to it.

I thank God for Love. And I thank one man for the black and white script of forever and I do.

I pull out old photos and revel in the rich beauty of their age. Faded layers tell the story truly.