Vows

I love you.  What is it about this phrase that makes us question its truth wet on the lips of others, or  when we overhear it in restaurants, at other tables, in buses or planes coming from a faceless voice behind us, in the darkness of a movie theater whether from the lips of teenagers on a date or coming off of silver-tongues from the silver screen?  Even the earnest lips of movie stars fail to convince us.  And then there are the people closest to us, those that we most want to believe who use the declaration in those awkward moments to appease us or seemingly to silence us in arguments.  We often do not believe it even when we are the speaker, when we articulate it quietly in the ear of the one that is the grand object of our affection.  

Three words, simple words, that we know we sometimes mean and yet we cannot make another person believe in our veracity.  This is an impossible persuasion.  None of us are capable of its demands.  None of us imagine ourselves worthy of its honesty.  Simple.  Impossible.  The phrase is unbelievable, unspeakable.  Yet we are under its spell.  I love you.  I mean it.  Believe me.   Perhaps we are able after thirteen years to say it to each other without reservation.  To hear it from each other without doubt.  I know it is most certainly truer today than it was back when we first met when, between easy conversations and passionate kisses it came so quickly and easily rolling off our tongues... 

I love you.

So much of those hours spent when we were first together are etched in electric precision on my mind.  I remember vividly the places we went, the people you introduced me to, the operas I saw, watching, captivated knowing the man on the stage was going to be leaving the theater with me.  And one day, in Chicago, we wandered the streets, the intimate restaurants, the halls of the art institute.  We were entangled in each others arms.  Somehow the burden of self consciousness that had always plagued me in my sexuality, had evaporated.  I was not a homo.  I was simply and magically a man in love.  Perhaps the more conservative element--such people with spectacles sitting askance on the ends of their nose--were offended by our behavior;  perhaps they were completely angered by this brazen display.  I didn't notice.  I didn't care.  Vibrating with an unabashed radiance, fueled by your touch, infused with the drug of your kiss, I was lost in you, in us.  I was, only, a man in love.  

Later, when we revisited that day, I learned that you had felt uncomfortable with my lucid, apolitical expression of my feelings for you.  Your own affectionate demonstrations, it appeared, had not poured out of you as spontaneously as mine but rather were a nervous reflection of the powerful wave of romantic and sexual energy that you evoked in me.  Oblivious to your anxieties as much as to the other people in the museum and on the street, loving you--audience be damned--I enveloped you in the mad maelstrom of my feelings.

And  I regretted having put you in that position but nevertheless marvelled that you had in your meeting me, inviting me into your life, staying with me, not pulling away from me had afforded me a glimpse of something bright and wonderful.  When I held you in front of some curious modern sculpture, when I kissed you bathed in the light of Chagall's stained class, when I stood with you holding hands for a long while staring in mutual appreciation of a painting that had caught our eye, you had shown me a future.  In your availability to my caresses, making out with me on a manicured lawn in a crowded public square, you had given me promise and possibility.  You had revealed to me a world in which our sexuality was more, no small part of us.  We were one entity, one man.  It was our life.  I cherish that day.  Its recall gives me shivers, aroused hairs on my arms, a broad smile.

And the future has met us, my beloved man.  Thirteen years ago, we did not have the option to run full speed into the courthouse to ratify our love.  Perhaps this is for the best.  I imagine we would have and now would look back at the naive creatures we were and laugh at the hapless immediacy that we imagined love to demand.  And, if we are honest, we would also regret and regret and perhaps trapped by the chains of marriage we might have begged someone to liberate us from each other and from this heavy and real obligation that sits in the heart of matrimony.  Maybe later, we would have looked back and with sighs and signatures on divorce papers we would have told our friends and family with a dark and bitter tongue, "He is not the man that I married."

And we would not be.

We have been through much my good man.  These intervening years.  The best men at our initial wedding, this imagined affair, may have been our good fathers, who now have passed.  Other people have departed as well... we are getting older and we have learned the heaviness of age, the inevitability of malady, the assurance of death...  Would we have been prepared for that then?  Would we have imagined ourselves able to endure these fates.

But here we are.  Eyes wide open.  And without reservation binding our hearts, our lives, our sizable fortunes.  You have again showed me a future.  Despite your worry and your anxieties, you are always the voice of hope.  You believe in us in a way that sets the sky on fire.  There are a thousand stars to wish on.  My first vow to you is to work harder and more diligently in holding onto that future and making it real.  I can be lazy in my despair, but you, us, makes me want to be strong, find my power, and live fully attuned to your hope for many many happy days, weeks, years together.

Is this vow enough?   Your mother did not think so... and in her Wedding card she wrote us her blessing.  "Remember marriage is based on Love, Trust and Respect for each other.  This will make for a happy marriage that will last forever."  I want such a marriage.  Like your parents and my parents.  I vow that I will give you that, and if I die before you, I will come sit on the side of your bed, and feeble voice that I have I will nevertheless sing to you.  All my songs are for you.  All my poems.

You are the center of my life.  You are my heart.  I can say this and I can hear it from you.  I can believe it.  I love you.  I love you.  I can believe that you can believe me. I love you.  And I am so very grateful that you convinced me to wait all these long celibate years til we were married...