on_marriage tender_square "love one another, but make not a bond of love: let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup. give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping. for only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. and stand together yet not too near together: for the pillars of the temple stand apart, and the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow." – kahlil gibran 211029 ... tender_square i was married for the first time by a justice of the peace in detroit city hall, eleven years ago on this very day. and i’ve only recently calculated the math of memory, which says i’ve spent less time in this country with the man who brought me here than the man that i am married to now. i don’t feel any wiser the second-time around. the more i live in the state of union, the less certain it remains the answer to a lifelong question. because if we believe a question has been answered, before the god and the government and our friends and family, there exists no further need to ask daily, “do you choose me?” love becomes a natural given, like gravity, like oxygen, when it’s a living verb needing to be nurtured. i want wake each day with that question in my heart and the heart of my beloved. and when it’s asked i want our answers, shown through action, to be a celebrated “yes!” 211118 ... unhinged i have never found someone worth giving up my freedom for; i grew up believing i would find someone to share my life with just like everyone else but that has yet to be true. the older i get, i see many of the marriages around me crumbling under the weight of the compromises they built the foundation of their life together on. there were two men in my past i could have eventually got to ask me to spend the rest of our lives together. both sweet, caring. but i couldn't bring myself to do it, continue our relationships on the path that ended in a ring and a ceremony and a house and kids. one of them is still a close friend and so is his wife. they are happy together. i don't know how to wrap up my feelings on my generally single life. sometimes the skin_hunger and coming home to an empty bed seems too much to bear. other times i am grateful for my solitude. some days are a big gaping hole; others i fill just fine all by myself. who knows what the future holds. 211118 ... kerry ms eppes was my photo teacher. she liked to sit in her office--a converted closet--and chew on her nicorette, as if it was secret, as if it mattered. she brought her old hasselblad 120mm to class, and i had never held such a beautiful machine in my hands. when third period was over i asked, practically begged, to borrow it, and felt so honored when she said yes. she was a painter married to a photographer. he came around sometimes with his shaggy hair and hip eyeglasses and i got to know him. i babysat their kids once. i sat on the floor with my back against the couch while her five-year-old son brushed my hair slowly, softly. her daughter’s room was painted silver and an antique dentist’s chair dominated the living room. a few years later i was visiting amanda in new york. she was so unhappy there. we went to central park and took pictures with my cheap soviet camera and wandered through an enormous fabric store in chinatown and trudged through the gray snow and i still have those boots, rimmed white from the salt. amanda told me she’d heard from ms eppes, that she was going to be in new york for a couple days and we should meet up. she was staying in a hotel next to radio city music hall. amanda got the address and her room number and we took the train to her hotel. she’d planned to meet us in the lobby but was still in her room when we arrived. she was leaner than i remembered but was happy to see us, flung her arms out wide and said in her south carolina twang, what a nice surprise, even though she knew we were coming. let’s go somewhere, let’s get out of this depressing place, she said. she said there was a bar nearby, that since we were with her surely they’d let us in. we were both nineteen. they did let us in. the bar was dim, loud. we sat in a booth, me next to her and amanda across the table. she ordered red wine for all of us. after we all had full glasses she announced that she and steve were getting a divorce. i don’t remember what either of us said. i do remember feeling shocked, even though both of my parents had been married before getting together and i knew plenty of divorced people. round two for me and ms eppes, amanda still on round one. it’s okay, ms eppes was saying, it’s a good thing, it’s necessary. she leaned over the table and said to us, wine-loose but also conspiratorial, i want you girls to know this: if you ever decide to get married, you have to be absolutely sure. she repeated: you have to be positive. if you have any doubt, any crumb of a doubt, don’t do it. she picked up her glass and about half the wine sloshed out and onto my jacket. it was a red jacket with a single white stripe down each arm, my favorite. oh damn, i’m sorry, she said, and i told her it was fine, because i didn’t know what else to say. i realized, nineteen and naive, that she was drunk. the jacket was ruined but i’ve kept her words in mind ever since. you have to be sure, absolutely sure. 211118 ... tender_square i keep thinking it’s not them, it’s me. that i grew up watching cinderella a thousand too many times. that for all of my life i defined success as wearing a ring on my finger. that i was afraid of being a divorced woman after giving up my name the first time, burnishing me with a mark of shame i wasn’t strong enough to wear. i keep telling myself we can only make decisions with the best information we have at the time. and in those moments when i stood across from those men looking into their eyes, i felt sure; i meant every word i said. sometimes i wonder if ’till death do us part isn’t about a physical death so much as the death of self in the act of transformation. there is so much mutual love and respect and warmth and support in my marriage. and yet. i can’t forget how i used to sanitize the fast-food play place as a teenage crew member, lying in the ball pit and singing carly simon to myself: “you say that we can keep our love alive, but soon you’ll cage me on your shelf. i’ll never learn to be just me first, by myself.” 211119 ... unhinged part of my issue, hesitancy on this topic is that i grew up with enough divorce in my family to know the messy devastations that can be extended outward like ripples on the surface of water. my fiercely independent streak, my aries ascendant, clashes with my hopelessly romantic libra sun to the point that i can't bear the thought of another man restricting me in any way. my father was very strict. my germanic family duty allowed me to quietly seethe over doing what he demanded but i also moved three states away to escape it. one of the first poems i ever wrote in middle school contained the lines: take me as i am don't try to change me i grew up with disney princesses; i ache for a prince charming still. but now i am finally becoming comfortable with the fact that i may be the prince charming i was looking for all along. 211119 ... tender_square “it’s not a being taken-for-grantedness, but rather, more of a complacency i feel from them, you know?” she closed her eyes and nodded solemnly at me. “i mean, the two marriages i’ve had have been pretty great, all told. and yet, here i am again.” sometimes i can’t tell if i’m moving forward or falling backward; i never thought i’d be on her couch seven years later having the exact same conversation. “i guess there’s something wrong with me that i don’t want to be married,” i concluded, dabbing my eyes with a tissue. “this isn’t a deficit on your part,” she clarified. she’s tender with me when i need it the most, confronts me when i need to look deeper. “you’ve grown into your independence and realized that this isn’t what you want anymore, this isn’t how you wish to define yourself.” she puts the new parts of me into perspective when i can’t yet see how they’ll fit. 211122 ... tender_square he and i wear my parents’ wedding rings. when my father bought my mother a new chocolate diamond to mark their 35th wedding anniversary six years ago, mom offered her former engagement ring and wedding band set to my older sisters first. they declined, said they would not marry; one suggested i could use it for my second ceremony. my father outgrew his thin gold band decades ago, his knuckles thickening from the wear and tear of working on classic car motors. mom had it as simple band on her thumb for a while, but gave it to me along with hers. he and i got the band fused with a silver one the same size to make it sturdier, a blend of metal i slid onto his finger five years ago. my younger sister often remarks that we are the junior version of my parents. in my mom’s speech at the wedding she spoke of the awkward way that he and i came to be a couple, that it was not unlike the way that she and dad had come together, that people in her life tried to dissuade her when she knew what was in her heart. she gave me a silver maple leaf brooch that was my grandmother’s that day, told me not to forget where i’d come from. i pinned it to my gown. i wore it again when he and i signed the paperwork for our house in canada last week. he and i talked of rings today but i don’t recall what prompted it; he reminded me that i’d never wanted an engagement ring, even though he asked. and i remembered that i didn’t want one the first time either; i didn’t even want to tell people i was engaged because how it came to be my future was both murky and strange. the second time around it was a joint proposal, none of this asking my father for my hand bullshit or waiting for him to pop the question. we both took a knee at sunset on the boardwalk and asked. i’ve never liked how a woman’s expected to wear a ring before the ceremony, to show that they’re “off market,” when a man has no such equivalent. i’m not a piece of property, though this is indeed the history of the institution of marriage. and i wonder now if this reaction was my first quiet rebellion against it, a signal that what i thought i’d always wanted wasn’t necessarily the same thing as what i needed. 211129 what's it to you? who go blather from