11Eleven Years
letter
My dearest Grace,
Eleven years ago today, in front of everyone we loved, I made you a list of promises and tried very hard not to cry through them. I cried through most of them. Today I want to make you a few more — quieter ones — and I am going to use the only language I am any good at: the slow one, the written one, the one that lets me say what I mean.
This is a small place I have built for you. There is a poem in it. There are songs that played in our car, in our kitchen, in the corners of our lives. There are photographs of us when we did not yet know what eleven years would feel like. There is a number — actually, there are two — that have been ours all along.
November
February
the number we keep finding
You were born on a two.
I was born on an eleven.
We were married, and now we have been married eleven times in a row.
Eleven, Twice
the second, and the eleventh.
A coincidence, or else a small instruction
from somewhere kinder than us.
I have made a small religion of you —
the cup left on the counter,
the way you sleep through thunder,
the second time you ask if I have eaten.
A vow is a kind of stubbornness —
a willingness to be surprised
by the same person, daily,
for as long as it takes.
have become a private alphabet —
written in birthday candles,
hotel rooms,
the corners of receipts,
the digits of our front door.
that arrives at me
without you sitting beside it,
holding the door.
will not fit on this page.
What I have learned in eleven years
will not fit anywhere
except in how I look at you.
I love you.(Eleven times — I have written it
all the way down the margin
in invisible ink.)
Eleven of these.
A number that will grow
the way slow things do —
quietly, completely,
without asking.
Save me the next dance.
The songs that found us
Three songs that have been in the room with us. Tap each to read the lyric I think of when I hear it.
Photographs of a Sunday
May 17th, 2015 — a small archive of the day that started everything.
So — thank you
for eleven.
For the second of November,
for the eleventh of February,
for every ordinary day in between.
I would marry you again. I would marry you
every May, on a Sunday, for as long as you'd let me.