The Dance
by MR
There are moments when I find myself stepping back from this dance that is our lives together and try to look at Ray and myself with the eyes of an outsider. What do others see when they look at us?
Like now in the kitchen of the cabin. Getting the evening meal ready, we move smoothly in and out, only occasionally brushing against each other, each in our own orbit. When we do collide, Ray smiles at me, and I smile back, and something warm and sweet flows from my chest into the rest of my body. Fifteen years. Fifteen years, and his smile can still make my knees weak.
One of the few times my grandmother ever spoke to me about marriage and family life, she told me that the little things were the most important. If you can get through the day to day business of living, Benton, she said, and climb into bed with the person you love at night and still love them, even though you’re too tired to do more than kiss them goodnight, then you know it will last. Real love, she said, burns slow and steady, waxing and waning at times, but never dying completely. It is always there to warm you.
What I had with Victoria, I now realize, was never real love. It was something else; something that burned hot and fierce and threatened to consume both of us, but in the end left nothing but ashes behind. It existed only for the moment.
And Ray? Ray is the last 15 years; the man who, even though his hair is beginning to go gray, is still the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen in my life. My joy in this slow, steady burn between us brings me, at times, close to tears. And when it does, Ray is the one who knows how to hold me until it passes. He never asks why. Perhaps he knows or guesses, or perhaps he simply wishes to allow me a secret of my own.
As for me, I can tell the minute I walk in if he’s had a bad day. Fifteen years has not, in any way, cooled his temper. He still rages against the injustice in the world. I am the one who holds his hand under cool water, who picks the splinters out of his knuckles after he’s punched the wall, who kisses him and assures him that he’s not a loser, he doesn’t suck, and that his humanity, his anger at the senselessness of so much that happens, only makes me desire him more.
And if there are nights when we’re too tired to do more than hold each other; evenings when going to bed means falling asleep on the couch watching TV, only to half-awaken and stumble in the bedroom proper before lapsing into our comas again, it only serves to make awakening the next morning that much sweeter. Because our love continues to burn slow and steady, never too much or too little.
And in the end, this dance we do is simply the dance of our life, lived from day to day, secure in the knowledge that what we are, what we have, will last forever.
FIN
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