We Have the Rest of Our Lives

When I wrote about our wedding day on this blog I said something about how wonderful it was to be loved for all my ordinary attributes, for all the small and simple things that make me fundamentally and effortlessly me. 

The irony in this is that our relationship has been anything but ordinary. 

 

I met him when I wasn't looking. I was focusing on me, on bettering myself, and healing from past hurts. 

But getting to know him felt so much like healing that I couldn't say no. 

So I said something else. 

 

"I'm moving to the East Coast." 

 

I wasn't sure of it until I said it in that moment, and I couldn't take it back after that. Until I said it out loud it was only an idea, a thing I saw faintly in my future, like a light I knew was coming.

 

He said, "That's okay." 

 

And somehow I felt it too. 

 

  

 

We had a matter of months together. As friendship became love, I felt shaky and uncertain when I was alone and my brain overthought and complicated matters. But there was something about being with him that simplified things, something about the way he quieted my fears.

 

But things got complicated fast when he left to go back home for good this time. 

I found myself crying on the way home from the airport. But somehow I never once felt scared that this would end things between us. 

The only problem was that things had barely started, and they were already becoming more difficult.

The rest is a bit of a whirlwind. The rest is something I still struggle to wrap my mind around, that still makes my heart feel like it needs a chance to catch a breath. 

 

We counted months apart. Across more provinces than years, we followed one another. 

 

At some point we were apart for more months than we were together. Then that changed again and we were together for more months than we were apart. 

 

Now I see him every day. 

 

Somewhere along the way I noticed a pattern that made my thinking problematic. Instead of thinking about the fact that we made it, that we are building a real life together in the East Coast, something which seemed so far when we counted the days till we'd see each other again, I started counted the things we'd missed out on. 

The distance robbed us of a few things, and so did the pandemic. I feel like I have been trying to catch up ever since.

 

I have felt this overbearing desire to make up for those missed experiences, the milestones we had to skip, or the phases we had to jump ahead to. 

A relationship that started off so simple and natural became too real too fast. It felt like we had to decide on forever or on staying apart. In the end it felt like we chose forever in a hurry. 

But that doesn't bother me anymore.

 

 

We did a few things backwards. Then, two years after a wedding in the midst of the first lock-down, we finally had our honeymoon.We went away, to an unfamiliar place, surrounded by strangers, in no ones company but each others. We walked on foot to another country, spoke with foreign ducks, and played mini-golf. We drank champagne in our hotel room as the sun went down.

 

We might have missed out on things, but, in the end, its not the missing that counts. Its how we grew, and comprised, and made things better; it's how we did things we never knew we would.

The milestones come even when their unanticipated, even when you don't realize that you've passed them until you are looking back and see how far you've walked together. 

 

 I'd walk anywhere with you, the short way or the long way. I'd take the detour; I'd walk the steep road. 

I'd walk all the way to France with you, or cross the bridge to Luxembourg to have dinner by the river.

 

The Milk and Blood of Marriage

:And its Icky and Intimate Parts ad Portrayed in"The Time Traveler's Wife"

The time and place in which we read a book is hardly inconsequential to our perception of it. 

I first read The Time Traveler's Wife when I was a young girl. In many ways, I was too young to understand the novel. 

 

There is some perfect irony in this, I think. As I reread the novel for the second time, I realized things I had not before. I saw and understood the novel on a level that was far more personal. It was both more familiar and more disturbing than it was to the mind of my younger self. 

 

 

The novel's protagonist Clare experiences this same sensation within her own story. She meets her husband at the young age of 6 when he appears naked in the front yard of her house. Her husband Henry, a man who suffers from a disorder that helplessly displaces him in time (also causing him to leave anything material and otherwise behind, including his clothes), will not meet her until he is 28 and she is 20. 

 

Naturally, there are some things that Clare at the age of 6 did not understand about the strange time traveler who appeared for fragments in the meadow near her home. He is in many ways a perfect stranger with whom she slowly becomes perfectly familiar, first from the perspective of a child with an innocent crush, and then from that of a teenager who has other more sensational things on her mind. 

 

Rereading The Time Traveler's Wife now I realized that in reading this as a young imaginative girl I had dubbed it a mere romance. Thus, it lost both its strangeness and its ordinariness. Now I realize that this is not the story of two people who come together, bound by destiny and love. Neither is this a story of science fiction, the tale of a time traveler with a disorder made real in its fictional limits. 

This is the narrative of Henry and Clare who find themselves together from the start of the story, and though their lives are bound ever since that day when Clare was young and pink and innocent, they are constantly being separated, by time and space, and by each other. 

 

The imagery bestowed to the second part of the novel, titled a drop of blood in a bowl of milk, paints the perfect picture of how this novel makes one feel. There is both an ickyness and an intimacy to the image; for marriage, while beautiful and intimate, has its icky parts too. The bowl of milk in this portrait is something soft and pale and usually untouched, though nonetheless it is spoiled by a small drop of blood. In the same way, Henry and Clare's marriage is stained over time by grief, by frustration, and resentment, by an irritation with the things that keep them apart, and so an irritation with one-another. 

Love stories often forget how ugly marriage can be. It is lovely to dream of first kisses, of wedding days, and white dresses, and the perfect romance of two people finding each other in a chaotic world. But when stubbornness and dissatisfaction sears and scars a once white and perfect thing, it is easy to forget the purity it once held. 

In the end it is those images that linger; these are the details that make the novel memorable: the seared gaze of a grief stricken widower, eye whites shot and yellowed by excessive drinking; the red smudged lips of a woman discarded by love committing suicide alone in her apartment; glimpses of white bloodied sheets stained by miscarriage; blurry pictures of white crystal snow sullied with the blood of a deceased lover; all reinterpretations of that spoiled bowl of milk painted into its type-scripted pages.

The Time Traveler's Wife is a portrait of marriage, as raw and unflattering as it is idealized and filtered by fiction; and it is painted in milk and old spilled blood. It leaves neither out. Beginning with a perfect meadow and Clare in white knee socks, it shy's not from love's icky, messy, and gruesome parts by continually staining perfect white things with red and yellow blotches. 

 

 

It is a strange way to depict a marriage. Despite its elements of science fiction and literally disordered timeline, their marriage feels doggedly raw, at times as passionate as it is tedious and frustrating. But that is not the strange part: the strange part is that it is its un-ordinary details, its time travel and thus its disjointed and dislocated lives, that makes this marriage feel at all true and real.

 

After all, it is not only Henry's strange genetic disorder that keeps them apart. At times, it is their stubbornness. Sometimes, it is their own grief or personal lack, an internal dissatisfaction not even their supposedly perfect love can fulfill. 

Instead of locking himself in his study or going for a drive, Henry simply disappears entirely, escaping to some other time and space. Time travel is simply the medium, the perpetrator that makes an emotional separation literal in their marriage. In reality, such things are not necessary.

Clare, like myself, once thought that getting to Henry would be the end of it; the happily ever after, not in the sense that this is the end of their story, but in the sense that, in everything that comes after, they could be happy. 

This, of course, is not the case. Clare's deepest hurts and hardest times come after. She wept once about how lonely it was to wait for Henry. But this was before, when she still knew he would come and she still had the list he gave her telling her exactly when he would return. Later, she has only the unfilled clothing he leaves behind, and the empty time spent waiting and not knowing when he will return to her.

I myself used to think that being married meant that one never had to be lonely again. It wasn't that I actively believed this, but it was a coming disillusionment I sometimes faced snippets of. I remember a friend once telling me how lonely she was finding marriage to be. I tried not to think about it. Who wants to believe there is no perfect cure for loneliness, after all.

In this way, Clare doesn't learn what it is to be lonely until she is separated from he who is closest to her, not just by time and space, but by personal stubbornness, by internal struggles, and often trivial frustrations. 

Sometimes the space across one's bed feels further than time and space. Sometimes one feels as separated from their spouse as if they were a perfect stranger. 

But that is what marriage is about, is it not? Not that I've been married all too long, so perhaps simply take this as an insight about a book I recently reread. 

Marriage, according to this particular novel, is about time; about finding time; making time; losing time; savoring time; and yearning for more of it. It is about washing the blood out of your sheets; it is about not minding the yellowed time-stains on a once clean and perfect dress; marriage is about the messy bits more than the pretty ones, because, after the mess has been made, we only cling to each other that much harder.

 

At the end of the day, marriage is a constant losing of the other, for spaces and fragments, one or the other is gone for a day, sometimes for a week; not literally gone like Henry, but emotionally, mentally missing. 

 

Marriage is about finding your way to each other, again, and again, and again. 

Sometimes it feels like there is never enough time, like there is always something in the way, keeping you from one another; always another red drop in each new bowl you pour.

 

But the world is never as still and perfect as when you find your way back; when the space between two people suddenly falls away and all the worries melt from your mind. 

 

 

 

 

I suppose the real truth is that I, like Clare, did not think that once I had him I would still spend so much time trying to find my way back to him again. I did not think that so many date nights would be canceled; that we would agree to do our own thing most nights. I did not think I would spend so much time waiting for him to come to bed. For us, neither of us needed to be a time traveler for time to keep us apart.

My, oh my, marriage can be complicated. But sometimes, every once in a while, it is the most simple thing in the world. 

It just takes a little washing and a little time.

But that's why you promise a lifetime, I guess. And him and I, we still have it all ahead of us. 

I for one will make the time to get back to him every day for the rest of my life.

What We Found in the Woods

2019: We went for a walk in the woods, you, me, and your family. The sun was out, and the snow was glistening. The trees were bare, though I could feel that in the warm winter air they were beginning to awaken. As we whisked through the forest, waltzing amongst trees that stood like sculpted pillars around us, something mystical occurred. 

Maybe it was the way the sun was shining, like a romantic sort of photograph in which the sun ignites the world with a flare, with sun-specks or sun-spirals or sunny-streaks that shimmer in your hair. Maybe it was the way the forest floor was frosted over with snow, like a ballroom floor glimmers below crystal chandeliers. Something about the way the trees whispered of spring and the way the earth smelled of change gave me a breath of something that felt like certainty. 

We came to a river, frozen at the foot of a gorge. Your mom told me about your childhood, about picnics and the way the trees had since changed. You told me that a lot of your stories took place here. Maybe that is what made the place feel so nostalgic; even though I’d never been here before, there was memory here. There were little versions of you running through the trees. 

I too grew up in the woods, running through trees with dirty feet and feathers in my hair, searching for adventure like Peter Pan’s Lost Boys; storing secrets in tree-trunks and looking for the entrance to Narnia or other lost realms.   

Forests have a weird way of appearing timeless even as they change. We both grew up in forests of our own, forests that we mapped and memorized, forests filled with the trees we climbed and memories of us as bare footed summer children, our noses sprinkled with freckles and our heads crowned by the sun, fancying ourselves the kings and queens of our forest kingdom.

It wasn’t then, but at some point in time my forest and your forest aligned. It occurred to me then, that, as I prepare to leave my forest behind, I wouldn’t so much mind moving into yours.

 2021: We went for a walk through a different wood this rather warm winter day and I was reminded of this piece I wrote almost two years ago. Me and my husband were only just dating, and I went to visit him over the break. It was the first time I met his family, the first time we started talking about what our future would look like. 

I decided almost on a whim that I would move to his province that summer. Sometimes I wonder if we would still be married now if I hadn't.

But that is the way adventures go, is it not? Occasionally a whim strikes us, almost like a childish desire to run away to live in the woods, but much more serious. 

All I knew then was that I was restless without him, and that home was where he was.

    

Turning it Around for Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is always brighter when reflected upon, or when seen in pictures afterwards. 

 

We entered this same forest last year, but the sun was not shining then like it did now. Last year the forest was a fairie one, full of moss, and little mushrooms and tiny timid snails. The dainty webs of spiders were bejeweled. Little streams stole through the leaves then, creeping through the crannies on the ground, barely heard. We hopped over them last year, trailed them, tapped our booted-toes in them. Last year this forest was undiscovered, unwoven by our trails, every bend a mystery.

 

Not this year. This year, the sun was shining, and the leaves were painted, like I'd always dreamed I could paint them with my messy oil pastels, bronzed and bitten, flushed and florid; as if the trees themselves exhaled a sigh, blissfully remembering how wondrous the summer has been.

 

 

This year the sun warmed the leaves like pie; this year the world seemed illustrated, like a picture book that stretches through the hundred acres. This year we were no strangers to the forest, we knew which trees to pass. There were no streams to hop, but there were roots to tip toe across. This year two kitties waited back home for dessert to begin (instead of just the one); this year, our family was a little bigger.

 

 

But there are some things these pictures cannot capture: Like how that same morning the skies were bleak and grey and I did not feel thankful at all; how we fought first, then thanked. 

But then we got dressed in fall colors, and we drove to my mom's house, and there it smelt like cinnamon, and apples, and cranberries, and warm turkey, and all the other fine delicious things you read about in books about holidays or critters that live in a red wall.

 

 

 

 

 

Fall gives such magic, and this year it gave me an even greater gift than timid snails and bashful streams over which to hop. This year fall gave me time; time to drive home in this golden kingdom after turkey; time to taste the tender goodies only a mother can bake; time to walk with my dad; to snap pictures of my brothers; time to fight with my husband, and fall asleep in his arms that same night.

 

 

Wedding Day

Who thought that getting married could be so simple!

Even when everything could have made it anything but easy: between the pandemic, the postponing, the uncertainty, the struggles, the waiting! But when we finally decided to just go for it, I knew it would be perfect! (Thats a lie, I knew it would be perfect - Nat)

Nathaniel, you make everything easier. Even when its complicated, even when its hard, or chaotic, or awful. You make life simple.

I always thought meeting the man I would marry would be transformational. And it was.

I also believed getting married would be such a big deal. And it is.

But it's also been far simpler than I ever realized.

It's simple because you love the simple things about me. Even though I used to believe that the person I'd marry would love me because they find me extraordinary, I learned from you that its much greater to be loved for the simple things about you. You love me because I'm ordinary in my own way, and that means I have don't have to be extraordinary; it means that you love me even when I'm lame, or irrational, or boring, or stubborn. You love the things about me that I don't think twice about, like how round me face is, or how dorky I am.

How grand it is to be loved for who you are when you're not trying; the things that stay when you are at your worst; the things that are fundamentally, ordinarily you. 

You reason with me when I'm unreasonable. You make everything seem doable. You make my simplicity my strength.

 I love the simple things about you. I love your humor. I love the way you love. I love the fact that my family loved you from the start. I knew you were the one when my Opa and Oma loved you when they met you at the airport; when my grouchy cat came to sit on your lap even though she never liked anybody, least of all strangers. I knew it when saying yes made far more sense than saying no. I love the way you play with my brothers, ever since that spring in Manitoba when it suddenly seemed like they were your brothers too.

I love your spontaneity, the way you run into the bushes, hop over streams, take me out for pancakes. We used to joke that we didn't go on dates, we went on adventures; and if dating you was an adventure, I can only imagine how grand it'll be to be married to you.

Let our life always be simple like this. Because when everything is wrong and life is a mess, the simple things keep us going: like cuddling up to you, laughing with you, grabbing midnight snacks with you, getting tickled by you.

How far we've come already.

We've followed each other across three different provinces. We've had adventures in new places, and faced countless changes. We've said goodbye way too many times, and counted too many days apart. We've built a new life out of pieces of our old ones and made it uniquely our own.

But in all the challenges we've encountered, you've always been there, at the end of the day, the wonderfully, extraordinarily, most fundamentally simple thing about my life.

And no matter where we go, and no matter what happens, let it always stay this way.

Oh, what a wonderful wedding day.

~ P.S. ~

Thank you to every one who tuned in to watch us get married from afar and supported us even though you couldn't be there! You filled our hearts with joy!

Thank you to those of you celebrated with us, and those who are patiently waiting for the day we can finally celebrate together! We await that day with such excitement!

Thank you to my brothers for making the day possible, for helping to run our wedding day and filling it with treasures!

Thank you to my new siblings, for your advice and support!

Thank you mom and dad for making our wedding perfect, even though it wasn't the way any of us ever thought it would be! (We got married in your backyard, even though it wasn't the one we intended and imagined all these years).

And finally, for the future, thank you to my new mom and dad for your support from afar as we eagerly await our wedding to come, in your backyard this time ;)

We hope to see you all soon...