They had seven decades together, provided for by the fates, each with a perceptible beginning, an arid interregnum (or an eventful one, depending primarily upon her proclivity to turn to the various shades of wine for comfort and entertainment) while the webs between them were re-sewn by those taciturn gods, and just as stark an end; then two more—glories which were all their own, squarely held in their fleshly hands and for their own sakes, which the fates could not hem in; in these their human wills triumphed in a human love in the way that we each hope for in old age —in a human way— against the tragedy of our plain and certain deaths. They were:
Ten years of laughter—his learning to make her laugh by way of her undressing, faster or slower, in accordance with his variegated wit;
Ten years of guessing. The taking of turns toward or away from the idea of commitment for the long haul despite the investments to date;
Ten years of the deepest and truest love, in light of which, were a comparison available to all parties, Romeo and his sad bride would readily admit their shame;
Ten years of feasting and fattening, as if they knew they were in for that long haul they had decided on, for a long and thinning winter, where she’d eventually stray from her celleric ideals while his convictions, what rivaled those of Krishna as concerned the moral procurement and rabid consumption of butter would only deepen;
Then, twice ten years of candle counting and an annually relearning of ‘happy birthday’ on the ever de-tuning piano, for the sake of their handsome offspring. These at first, which they’d recount as their best, but which they would later realize that, while good, were also compact, harried, and as such their most aging years as viewed from the latter wisdom of their rocking chairs, which, from their seated retrospect, could not rock slowly enough as to keep their idealistically grasping, wrinkled lover’s hands close enough in their togetherness;
Ten years grace, given first by her, to the necessity of finding the boy he’d sacrificed in becoming the man that he knew that —if only owing to her beauty and fairness alone— she deserved; a killing not less than that by Abraham of Isaac, had he not been spared by God’s own grace and mercy. For every man is the killer of the boy he once was, few of whom can stomach the truth of which, if admitted, is capable of redeeming a lifetime un-lived in boyish splendor. The men who do summit that old and bloody altar are those who, through the same sacred mechanism of trade with that only and oldest divinity, timeless itself and capable of bestowing such grace, who may receive a second youth. And this is the rare glow of the young-old man that those others, with their canes and eminently repeatable woes envy as they rot from a sacrifice only half redeemed;
And finally, as is the natural course of the yet more sacrificial and thereby truly more fair half of the species, ten years of grace returned; to her, his pride and prize, his ‘if-not-for’.
In her decade, fittingly the capstone of these two lives’ tangled endeavor, she would take, with as much ‘Capital-Ess’ “Self” as she could —and not all ten years would she get, for two would be spent unlearning the long held habit of ‘otherishness,’ the time to breathe in, at last, to the bottom of her lungs, the pride of a life made, and made well— in her incomparable image ,in her indomitable spirit of hope against moments that were more ageless states of despair deserving of their own aristocracies than they were moments. For moments like those she’d borne were agnostic to and impenetrable by time; moments when, if not for a hope like her’s, life would make little enough sense that the devil’s tool, as it always is, would shine brighter with logic than the love (the hope) in the love of God’s mother, Mary.— And the breadth of trust that, given their decade of guessing, was behind them, she could relax into, like a bath, whose source of heat, she felt assured, could last ten winters. With this long awaited baptism, she cast her crow’s feet as she looked downward toward the womb that gave rise to her desire for just this life she’d earned.
Her water would rise in that bath, in both depth and temperature, as warm tears Mixed with joy and self pity, pride and pride’s reflection on its price, anguish, shone back at her. With a long soft cotton embrace, she would begin singing in the mornings to his ever de-tuning piano, and without a fraction of the timidity she had in all those long years before her late but effervescent rebirth. She’d win new admiration each day from her lover, in awe that a woman who had given so much could have so much more fruitfulness within.
In a final ten years they would die together, the envy of Shakespeare’s pen and the ideal of a family whose seeds would forever know how to find, by the laughter, and guessing, and the truest love, and by feasting, and by candle counting, and grace, and mutual sacrifice, that same rich soil of her heart’s eternal forest.