Bring In the Plants

If I had three lives, I’d marry you in two— the third I’d keep for learning how to stay when staying has splinters. Call it ballast, or prayer. In one life we are ordinary and bright: keys on a hook, a window that remembers our breath, your laugh uncapped like summer soda, fizzing the room. We learn the grammar of Tuesdays, yes— how to lay a clean cloth over the table, how to make the light last a little longer by talking. In another we bruise and mend by turns. We quarrel over groceries and what the word tired means; bananas go from green to gone before we can agree. There is a night I sleep on the couch, a morning you scrub the pan too hard and cry. We say the wrong thing, then the right thing slowly. We pass the salt like a truce. Your silence once tucked into a winter book now marks a page we return to with care. We read it aloud sometimes, softly, to remember where we tore and where we stitched. Your laugh still tastes of August, but less like candy— more like a peach with a stubborn pit: sweet, a little work, juice down the wrist, something to bite around. We keep small altars: the chipped blue mug, a list on the fridge that says onions, foil, kindness. We also keep a toolkit: apologies, three sizes; questions with dull edges; patience you can sit on. The lighthouse holds until the bulb doesn’t— then one of us climbs the ladder. The other holds the base, steadying the shaking that doesn’t show from shore. Loss visits. It takes a coat, a city, a friend, and sometimes it takes the version of us that spoke in hymns. We let that version go, not out of bitterness but to make room at the table for who we are tonight: misbuttoned, hopeful, hungry. We bless the food. We eat the same soup we argued over. It’s warm. It’s enough. Not always—often. If I had three lives, I’d still choose two vows: one for joy with its unbroken glass, one for the crack we press our thumbs against together. I’d leave the third for walking out past the harbor, learning the names of winds that change their minds, so I can return and say: it will storm, love. Let’s bring in the plants. Let’s light the hallway. Let’s sleep near enough that if we dream of falling, we wake to find a hand already there. If I have one life—and I do— let it be this balanced thing: sugar and rind, altar and anvil, a home that smells like onions and rain, a promise that knows the cost of keeping. Not a fantasy. Not a wound alone. A door that opens, again and again, because we choose to turn the key, and sometimes we choose to knock.