24 Years Of Choosing To Do Life Together
Handy Husband and I celebrate 24 years of marriage this week. 24!
Time flies when you wake up every day and choose to do life together. That’s what we’ve done. Made that choice every day. Even when it was hard. Especially when it was hard.
And I hope there remain many decades for us to choose to do life together.
I ran across the most beautiful poem about love recently called Mouthful of Forevers. The first part of the poem doesn’t exactly apply to our love story, as we got married so darn young, but the rest of it tore through my heart in the best way with its poignancy.
I’m not sure I could read this poem out loud and not choke up, especially at the end.
I hope the words of Clementine von Radics speak to your soul as much as they did to mine.
Mouthful of Forevers by Clementine von Radics
I am not the first person you loved.
You are not the first person I looked at
with a mouthful of forevers. We
have both known loss like the sharp edges
of a knife. We have both lived with lips
more scar tissue than skin. Our love came
unannounced in the middle of the night.
Our love came when we’d given up
on asking love to come. I think
that has to be part
of its miracle.
This is how we heal.
I will kiss you like forgiveness. You
will hold me like I’m hope. Our arms
will bandage and we will press promises
between us like flowers in a book.
I will write sonnets to the salt of sweat
on your skin. I will write novels to the scar
of your nose. I will write a dictionary
of all the words I have used trying
to describe the way it feels to have finally,
finally found you.
And I will not be afraid
of your scars.
I know sometimes
it’s still hard to let me see you
in all your cracked perfection,
but please know:
whether it’s the days you burn
more brilliant than the sun
or the nights you collapse into my lap
your body broken into a thousand questions,
you are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
I will love you when you are a still day.
I will love you when you are a hurricane.
I don’t know what tomorrow has in store for us.
I just know that even our worst days are better when we are together.
Happy anniversary, Handy Husband. You are loved.
P.S. We wised up a few years ago and started reusing a singular anniversary card year after year. I’m going to keep sharing this idea because not only is it sweet and sentimental, but it saves money too. I’m practical that way. Ha!
Every year we both add a new message inside the card and date it. I imagine in another few years we’ll have to add pages to the card and it will become a little book documenting our love, or at least, our anniversaries.
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