Loving You

(A Valentine)

🖤
it all goes back to riding in a fast car 
when I was sixteen and realizing 
how scary and glorious love could be 
but then tossing that moment up in the air 
like a jangling set of keys so high in the sky 
that it took almost thirty years 
before it landed back in my lap 
and I found you 
and opened my heart to let you in 

🖤🖤
and then it was like stepping out the back door 
of our house and walking into infinite shades of green 
with jumbled tamaracks and a hidden hawthorne
and prickly wild raspberry bushes growing 
so luscious that berries dropped from them and 
knowing that all of it didn’t have to mean anything 
except it did mean everything 
and so we got married and fell into all of it together 
just before the storm came and then 
the storm did come and it raged all around us 
and nothing was ever the same again 

🖤🖤🖤
and now it’s like standing on the dock of a lake
no, on a beach at the shore of an ocean 
so vast and deep and realizing 
we’ll never find out what it holds 
or how we could possibly understand all of it 
even if we wanted to (which we don't)
and knowing that’s okay 
because we’re going to be okay

🖤🖤🖤🖤
loving you is like all of that

---

Music pairing: Tracy Chapman — Fast Car (1988)

---

Photo: Diane Perazzo — The path through the cedars behind our house on Willowbrook, 2011

All written work is entirely my own creation and not generated using artificial intelligence. Wording, structure and ideas are conceived and grown organically from my own unique human experience, personal thoughts, efforts, knowledge and research.