Just So You Know

(D)avid, adjective
1 an avid reader of science fiction
keen, eager, enthusiastic, ardent, passionate, zealous, hard-core; devoted, dedicated, wholehearted, earnest. See note at eager . antonym apathetic.

This morning, while driving to work, I thought of you as I often do on my drives, even on jaunts to the grocery store, anytime I’m without you. I drank my orange juice and pictured us last night as we were lying in bed, picking on each other and play fighting. I thought of us hysterically laughing in whispers so as not to wake up Callie, then settling down and turning our backs to one another to succumb to sleep and another week and our most-preferred sleeping positions. I started thinking about how quickly I transitioned from sleeping alone while we’ve been apart these last six months back to feeling the bottom of your feet pressing into the backs of my calves in the middle of the night. When I wake up suddenly, or just before you do, and I find your hand on my pillow, or I turn to face the wall and see the very tip of your head—a cluster of your hair, a thin strip of your forehead— sticking out from the top of the covers, I am not alarmed. I’ve fallen back in to being used to you.

I’m used to you here: your soggy towels leaving small pools of moisture on the carpet, on the comforter. Your glasses left behind on top of a pile of books on the coffee table. Your white t-shirts stuffed in baskets, or drawers—sometimes hidden in corners with holes in the sleeves. Your optimism, making me feel so rich with love when we are so poor. Your assurance never failing to keep me believing.

I like you here in our robin’s-egg blue house with our dogs. Where pasta is what’s for dinner every night, and we buy wine when we can’t afford it, and you always ask me to stay up and watch movies with you, but when I decline—say I’m too tired— you follow me upstairs to bed, anyway. You make every day fun. Every day an adventure. Every day one that ends with me smiling and laughing in your arms.