I imagine a book I could have written during this time.
Not a collection of poems. Something longer. Something that tried to contain what I had been discovering.
This conversation did not actually happen this way, but I can see how it might have.
Lynn is in the bedroom.
There is nothing unusual about the moment. We have been together long enough that seeing my life partner there could have become too familiar to be appreciated for what it was.
She is comfortable and at ease—something I have come to depend upon without always thinking about it.
I enter the room.
“Hi,” I say, a little hesitantly, wanting to know whether she has time to talk.
She turns toward me. “What’s up?”
“I’ve been writing something about us,” I say. “Not a poem. Something longer.”
She smiles slightly, curious. “Oh?”
“It’s longer, and it isn’t finished. I don’t even know whether I should print it yet.”
I pause.
“Can I just tell you about it? You can tell me whether it makes sense. I would value your judgment.”
She sits on the bed and gestures for me to sit beside her.
“Yeah. Come here.”
I sit to her right and turn slightly so I can see her face. For a moment, I say nothing. I am trying to find the right place to begin.
“When I met you,” I say finally, “I probably had ideas about love. I was looking for something—a connection—but it was all abstract. It was something I wanted without actually knowing what it was.”
I look up and to the right, searching for the words.
“Before you—
“I mean, before us, our life, and our love—
“it was only an idea.”
The book would begin there: with the difference between imagining love and discovering what it felt like to live inside it.
“It wouldn’t be only about the large moments,” I tell her. “It would be about the things that happen so often that someone else might call them ordinary.”
I think about the invitation she frequently offers at bedtime. It is intimate without necessarily being sexual. Without speaking, she captures my attention and invites me closer. I place my arms around her, and we remain in that continuous embrace as we drift toward sleep.
Excitement gently fades, allowing the serenity of sleep.
“Even though it happens frequently, it is always extraordinary,” I say. “We never talk about it, and still, it never feels ordinary.”
I glance at her before continuing.
“The book would be about the fact that I keep noticing.”
I would write about buying her a gift for Valentine’s Day or her birthday. I would write about entering a store and refusing to remain the quiet, nearly invisible person waiting for someone to notice him.
“When someone offered to help me, I didn’t simply say that I needed a gift. I declared that I was looking for something for the woman I loved. Her name was Lynn.”
I smile at the memory.
“I know people walk into stores every day to buy gifts for someone they love. I know there was nothing unusual about it to anyone else. But it never felt ordinary to me. I felt compelled to announce the experience.”
That moment belonged in the imagined book because it revealed something about who I had become. The profoundly shy person I had once been wanted strangers to know that I loved someone and that she loved me.
“It was like the time I stood before friends, acquaintances, and other people and read a love poem dedicated to you and our love. I wasn’t only looking for feedback about my writing. I wanted to say it publicly.”
I smile again, my attention briefly moving into the memory.
Then I look at Lynn and see the appreciation in her eyes.
“I love you,” I say, more softly but clearly. “That still seems profound to me. It seems worthy of a book.”
I shift slightly, gathering the next thought.
“The book would also be about what happened at my parents’ house.”
I wait for some sign that she remembers.
“I had become extremely anxious. I was near the kitchen table, wondering why we had come. Then I saw you on the other side of the room talking to my mother.”
I had crossed the space between us quickly, almost without deciding to move. I slid behind Lynn and wrapped my arms around her. She rested back into me, and I placed my head near her shoulder.
“And in that moment, I was with you,” I say.
“Not merely near you.
“Not simply in the same room.
“With you.”
Everything changed.
“I felt safe. I felt calm. Even there.”
Her relaxation had spread into me. The room became quiet as the conversations around us stopped. I looked toward my mother without speaking, knowing she could see what Lynn and I had.
“You calmed me in a way I hadn’t realized I needed. After you comforted me through the nightmares about childhood abuse, I thought you understood what I was feeling without requiring me to explain everything first.”
I look at her more directly.
“You acted in rhythm with what we had created. But it wasn’t only about me needing comfort. It was about what existed between us.”
I had looked at my mother with unspoken words about another kind of love—one she had never seemed able to express to me.
There is a longer silence.
“I would put that in the book because I want to explain what safety can mean,” I say. “It wasn’t that you could change what had happened in my childhood. You couldn’t change the house or the people inside it. But I was no longer alone there.”
I pause.
“I keep noticing all of it—all these things that could have been taken for granted. Instead, they make me feel that I should write about this and share the story.”
Lynn continues listening.
“The engagement ring would have to be in it.”
I remember when we selected it together and how excited I was that this was happening. It was real and still beyond my ability to describe completely.
I had treasured the words spoken at the jewelry store:
“Your fiancé can pick it up on Monday.”
The word fiancé stayed with me.
“When I came to where you were living, you must have known I would have the ring. You saw the box in my hand. I went into your bedroom, and you waited a moment before joining me.”
I had begun opening the box when she entered.
“I looked up and saw tears of joy in your eyes. That stopped me.”
I had not expected her tears—not because I doubted her love, but because nothing about the ring was a surprise. We had chosen it together. She knew when I would collect it.
“You already knew everything that was happening,” I say. “But then I understood that it wasn’t about what you knew. It was about what you were feeling.”
My joy was no longer mine alone.
It expanded.
“What I felt became something we were both inside of.”
“I love you so much,” I tell her.
All these things—the quiet nights, the public declarations, the safety I found in her presence, the ring, her tears, and the life we continued building—filled me with a sense of awe.
“That would be the real subject of the book,” I say. “Not simply that two people met and fell in love. It would be about the awe of discovering something I couldn’t have understood before we created it together.”
What we had felt transcendent to me.
Lynn finally speaks, a slight tear in her eyes.
“I feel the same way,” she says. “I don’t take your words or our love for granted either.”
I sit quietly for a moment, searching for something closer to what I mean.
“I keep thinking about how people try to describe experiences they cannot completely explain,” I say. “I’ve heard about studies in which researchers try to measure religious experiences—placing someone in an MRI and looking at what happens in the brain when the person feels connected to something profound.”
I let out a small breath, almost laughing at my own attempt to explain it.
“I don’t believe an image of the brain could prove what the experience means. But the idea of it—that sense that something has happened to a person and changed how everything feels afterward—that comes close to what I am trying to describe.”
I look at her, checking whether I am making sense.
“I didn’t know it could feel like this. I couldn’t have known until we created it together.”
The imagined book would be an effort to communicate that change. It would not attempt to prove that our love was more important than anyone else’s. It would explain why it was extraordinary to me.
It would describe what it meant for someone who had once felt invisible to become fully known.
It would describe the difference between wanting love and waking up inside a life made from it.
It would explain why familiarity had not erased wonder.
“And now that I know,” I say, “I feel compelled to write about it. I want to find the words that might allow someone else to understand what is so difficult to put into words.”
I glance at her again.
“Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”
She pauses. I wonder whether she feels she should thank me, even though gratitude is not what I am asking from her.
The rest of our conversation confirms the experience we have been sharing.
“This would be for you too,” I say after a moment. “I want you to know that I noticed.”
I noticed her tears when she saw the ring.
I noticed the way she leaned back into me at my parents’ house.
I noticed the wordless invitation to hold her at night.
I noticed the life we had created and the person I had become inside it.
The conversation did not happen exactly this way.
But the book would have been true.