Long workday and no inspiration, so this one is also from the vault! Written in 2012, 16 years into our relationship, this is quite possibly the strongest tribute to us as a couple that I have ever written.
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THE MOMENT OF MARRIAGE
I never thought that love would be a blessing I could count.
I never believed that another human being would mesh with me.
When you came into my world, I didn't know how to behave.
I cowered from all your affection and turned you away.
I'm sorry today.
I look back on the greatest and most understated reunion of my life,
when you and I touched truth and decided we could not sever ties.
I wax poetic on this, because for me, it was salve on every wound.
It was the healing I sought everywhere but where I should have.
I was blind to the bounty that you laid in front of me,
and the realization of your love was the grace that saved me.
Like the fables etched in time,
you and I have become an immeasurable entity.
Mythical, it seems we should be.
Yet we're fresh and blood and breathing.
Still nothing can come in between.
Should the fire reach our door,
I'll sweep you up and carry you away
to the place where love rains every day—
where destructive flames cannot burn,
and irrelevant becomes the outside world.
Boldly, I'll say — their theories hold no sway.
Interlocked souls may stretch but never part.
The moment of marriage
is not within an intricately planned ceremony.
It is a spontaneous spell
that turns intertwined fingers
into intermixed spirits.
No separation can occur.
I will fight for you,
should any suitor mistakenly dream
that they have the power to interfere.
There exists no device that can rip apart what we've sewn—
not starry-eyed minstrels who sing you love lyrics,
not overarching indifference gathered from dry decades,
not even death with its finality and stealthy ways.
Whatever comes next, we'll conquer it.
Wherever we go with our last breaths, we'll reunite there yet again.
Even all the darker times and question marks will make sense.
Up there on the trophy shelf with our victory plaques
will be the snapshots and memories of the challenging half.
The battles we fought and won, and the tears we shed for love.
I wouldn't trade a heartbeat of it for calmer seas,
because without those times I wouldn't know
how far I'd go for you or how far you'd go for me.
I celebrate it all today. The sun, the storms, the everything.
I wake up every morning knowing that I am complete.
That I've found the one whose jagged edges fit with mine,
so that we seem smooth and clean and unbroken
under all but the most high definition scrutiny.
This union, this marriage, this bond —
it needs no formal recognition to make it real and permanent.
The papers the others are approved to sign
get torn in two and tossed in the fire.
If the earthly rulers grant us that status,
we'll use it as a license to uplift one another.
But signatures and circles of gold are transitory.
Our names were carved out of the sky in stars
before our cries hit the air at the moments we were born.
We are the destiny that divinity has spun. We are already one.