This morning I got to, for a while, live in a life that wasn’t mine and wonder what it would be like if it was.

This is what I came up with.

I wake up at 6:30 am most mornings, earlier than you. The windows in our bedroom are always cracked or gaping open because I can hear the birds better that way and you say the sun feels stronger without the glass. I press into you and hold you for a few minutes, so as not to forget that our love, a love like this, is not worth losing. I kiss the soft side of your neck and sneak out from under the covers, our covers, that are always so painful to leave.

Everything in this life is effortful, but we like it this way. French presses make for more time to kiss and talk over settling coffee. Kettles make tea taste better and silver spoons to stir our breakfasts we have to wash by hand because our best conversations always happen over the sink.

The kitchen is decorated with vases of drying flowers and mugs we bought in thrift stores when I moved in. I play music softly, a playlist we made together for simple mornings like this. I make my coffee, my stomach full of some mystic emotion I have come to know well in this life with you.

The shelves in our house have film cameras, antique books, and snow globes. We have bookshelves, plenty of them, and we each bring home treasures to add to them nearly every day. The mirrors have little notes that we leave each other, and the dining room has a table barely big enough for two.

On mornings like these I pretzel on the couch we found on the side of the road in Barrington and read the philosophy books you found for me last week. My mug reads “The Golden State,” and we both refuse to look up whether that’s a real state slogan or not.

We’d rather use it to describe how we feel together.

I alternate between pages I’ve written and pages I haven’t as the sun grows in power over the roofs next door. I’m surrounded by houseplants, always, another one of those things I think I always wanted but could never articulate. But when I met you you were full of those, the kind of art and stories and habits that I looked at in awe.

You are someone I didn’t even know I wanted to become, and now you’re sleeping in the bed we share and I’m sitting on the couch we fall asleep together on. Oh, those nights of too much red wine and not enough conversation. But time can’t be wasted with you.

You can sing, but only for me, not matter how much I beg you to make something of it. You write songs in a little red spiral notebook we keep by our bedside and sing them to me on Tuesdays. When you sing your long fingers strike my heartstrings on your guitar, your dark hair falls over your face and you glance at me between the loops it makes. I always squeal and kiss you when you’re done and every time I find that I’ve come home.

Something about you penetrates me deeply, but not in the way the ones did before you. You’re more gentle, more deliberate, more me-and-der-ing and better at picking up my pieces along the way.

Our home has an achy, cracked, brown door that rattles during rainstorms. On those days we stay in our little hovel together, we play chess and dance to Noah Kahan and 2014 pop hits in the living room. The world’s still moving too fast for our generation, we’ve decided.

We have to press the coffee table to the wall because there wouldn’t be enough space otherwise.

Whatever our careers are, they aren’t careers, not really. We live the lives that we could live anywhere, and we do live everywhere. Road trips, we find, awaken our imaginations and make us better creators. Small grocery stores, careful budgets and piles of receipts are the lives we’ve chosen, and that’s ok.

Without dishwashers, electric cars and matcha made my someone else there’s more space for our love. I’ve always believed that, but didn’t until we met. You teach me how to make space, you emptied my life and refilled it, showed me what a capacity I have to dream and taught me, over and over again, that my imagination was something worth exploring.

Thank you for teaching me how to dream. Thank you for taking my soft being into your home and merging mine with yours, thank you for the adventures we share and thank you for the purple flowers you bring home from the booth up the street. But most of all, thank you for reaching into my soul, pulling out the best parts, and spreading them out in rooms we share,

rose quartz, incomplete decks of cards, wooden figures, fire escapes and tattered journals

so both of us stop wondering, finally, what could have been. Because we are, and that is more than

more than

enough.

❤

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