We got lost somewhere in the middle years.
Not dramatically. Not with a rupture or a crisis or the kind of event that makes a clear line between before and after. We got lost the way people get lost when they are busy, the way two people can be in the same house and raising the same children and managing the same life and still be drifting, slowly, away from the frequency they used to share, until one day they look at each other over the dinner table and realize they have been having the logistics conversation for months and do not remember the last time they had the other kind.
The children leaving made us face each other again.
There was nowhere to look except at each other and what I saw when I looked was someone I had let get partly unfamiliar, someone who had been changed by the same years that had changed me and who I had not been watching closely enough to track the changing. He was different. I was different. We were different together than we had been, the differences accumulated quietly over years while we were both facing outward, and the question was whether the different-together was still a together.
He came back slowly.
Or I did. Or we both did, toward each other, across the distance the years had made. He started asking me things again, not the logistics, the other things, the things that require you to actually look at the person you are asking, to be interested in the answer, to have a conversation rather than a coordination. He started noticing things and saying so. He started laughing at my jokes in the particular way that tells you someone has actually heard you, not politely, actually.
I have been moving toward him too.
Making room for the version of him that arrived after the middle years, the one that is quieter and more certain and less interested in performing anything and more interested in the actual texture of a Tuesday than he was at forty. I like the Tuesday version. I like the version of him that has been through things and is still here and still choosing this, still finding his way back to me across whatever distance the years put between us.
We went to bed early last Wednesday. We talked until midnight. We were not tired when we stopped. We stopped because the day needed to end.
I had forgotten we could do that. I am glad we still can.
