In Time

We dance in the kitchen at ten o’clock.

We take the coffee out to the porch.

We say the hard things instead of banking them.

We have real conversations, the kind we’d let die, and I am still, at sixty-five, discovering things about this man I’ve been married to for four decades, because it turns out a person keeps becoming someone, and if you stop paying attention you will wake up beside a stranger, and if you start paying attention again you will find, waiting there, someone new to fall in love with, who happens to have been beside you the whole time.

That is the discovery that still astonishes me, all these months in.