Twenty-two Years
Two a.m.
I couldn’t buy alcohol when we started dating the spring of 2000. He would play the clubs and I would have to stay home the first few months until I turned twenty-one. I would await him at my place. I wondered how serious he’d take me— allowing him to show up at two a.m..
He played the bass and worked construction. Driving the big earth movers. He would get off work smelling of dirt and grease. I’d sleep over and make him sandwiches with cool cucumbers to cut the heat of the desert.
We rescued a dog and named her after a book we both read as children. We stayed out till two a.m. getting drunk, smoking pot, eating two dollar tacos. Quickly we found a place of our own. Home. A word we have since been lucky enough to have and hold.
He gave me a ring after we fought about how he kept telling everyone but me that I was the one. One year later we married outside. Birds flitted about our heads while we exchanged vows like we charmed them. It was a perfect evening in 2002.
He had worked so hard but began to see that the creosote dirt I liked the smell of would keep others away. It would keep the opportunities he wanted away. He left the band. He left the dirt and went to school with the other others.
I stopped making his sandwiches. I made sandwiches for other people’s children and stopped babying him. He packed his own lonely lunches. Jazzing them up with stolen fast food condiments, saving his money for the two a.m. poker game.
Within two years of marriage we separated.
For a horrible summer we were not two, but something else— an imaginary number. Like neither of us properly existed. Like when the clock is switching and the time is wrong no matter what you say. Everything was wrong then and that time with its minute hands and second hands can still touch our now. Seasons can linger. Summer is a mutual least favorite now. We breathe come autumn. The cool usually calms. Usually.
We had found a way back. And we have since stayed. It felt like all time was ours now since we had overcome, since we had chosen what we knew was right.
Together we would be impervious to the world.
But we are only human and it doesn’t take long for life to seep through.
I don’t know what time I got pregnant, or what time I lost the baby. It was the time of year on the clocks when the seasons won’t pass by quick enough. When everything lingers. When you long. I remember the shower after I got home from the hospital. Maybe that was two a.m..
It was still just the two of us.
We bought concert tickets instead of baby clothes. We made every two hour trek to the bigger venues. We bought two tickets every chance we got. Going into debt for shows. Winning tickets on the radio. Surprising each other with tickets, making long term plans, big vacations to see our favorites. Little nights downtown to see the nameless, the forgotten. We made a soundtrack that if played backwards might make us young again. We’d fall into two star hotels at two a.m.. We’d try to be quiet and then forget and not care.
Nothing but us ever mattered.
Nothing but us until the fractals of us arrived.
A child. And some years later another. We named them both after trees, something rooted, something that embraces change with beauty, something neither of us ever mastered.
Neither child was born at two a.m.. That stays our time.
Even those hours we slept through, the hours we think we long for now.
There were so many wakeful nights I wondered who I was but I didn’t speak my questions, didn’t speak my self because I had made a life with not one, but now three people who counted on me. I let myself go silent in new ways and vanished into the existence of those I love, those who need me.
We had many days of utter joy. Days with our children exceed the capacity of one heart, which is why they say it takes a village… but we have always enjoyed being together best. Alone.
Only the world and the two of us.
The best of the best of our alone time may have been when I met him in London. He was so proud of working to get us there. This was the opportunity he saw when he left the dirt behind. The big international city and all it stood for, it had finally become like a second home to him. He sought out the side roads and the food spots. He knew of a pub we could call our own. Conversations at our small table became a foundational memory for us, a place for him to tell me he knew who I was.
He knew me before I did. He could see my fear stopping me. And he had lured me out of my comfort zone. He helped me grow. I can only understand that now. He saved my life that trip.
London is also the place I now look back on and can see he was already losing his vision in a way that meant his life would be changing. He tripped over steps at the Marble Arch that he should have seen. It very well may have been at two a.m…. and it may have been that we were so drunk it would be easy to say that is why he stumbled…
But we know better now. Those days were the last I let him lead.
Ever since I have been his guide— ever since that last time when he was mine.
Perhaps, even more so than after our reconciliation, we were more committed to each other than ever before after that trip. We had been together seventeen years. All the time before still mattered deeply, but now all our time forward would have a new foundation.
Despite his blindness, despite my woes, you should think we have lived ideal days before and after this, and honestly in so many ways we have. We were able to travel with our children, something we long wanted to do. Our lives felt expansive and there were moments I literally told myself “these are the good days.’ And I meant it. I think we all may have. We knew what we had, and best of all, we noticed.
Alas, again, being human and all, noticing the miracle of beauty isn’t enough to keep the difficult away.
Sometimes I see the difficult where there is none.
I invent it.
He lives in reality. I make up stories.
Not only do I fancy myself a writer, I insist I can make-up my own world to live in as payment for what was taken from me. I try not to let my fantasies interfere with people, but My Love, he is so close. Whatever I do touches him. Whatever I undo… Writer or no, it is not always storybook.
For nearly two years now I have undone myself. That makes the life I have shared look wobbly. We stand on viscid ground with jelly legs. We view our past through gelatin desert spectacles. Our world will not stop moving. The hours will not stop shifting memories. And now more than ever we understand it is— and will be, simply the two of us. Infinitely fragile and vulnerable not because we just met, but because we met forever ago. Our delicate nature means something more this late on, the rawness. It makes the hurt linger, makes the love exponential.
Two o’clock now lays in bed with us like a fog. I am no longer the one who is sleepless and wondering who I am. As I define myself I become a stranger to him overnight. Someone that just arrived with wild eyes and daydreams. Nightmares. I have been insistent and relentless like waves. Now an ocean knocks between us and we hold paper boats on different shores. The distance is my doing. I threw myself to a far off island, demanding time to be a castaway. He says from a distance I resemble the person who used to be his wife but he is wary of me now.
I understand. Looking for me is brave of him.
It is late.
We struggle to muddle on with our dusk-set minds.
Every day it is two a.m..
We either cling or we crash.
We cry or we couple.
Then in the light, we find only ourselves in this life we both invented,
us and nothing more.
Yet it is everything.
On Saturday it will be twenty-two years of this feral wedded life, I wanted to tell you about him. About us.
About the two of us at two in the morning.
We have the entire day of years. We hold an archive of us, of our hours, our decades now. I love this person who has every age I have known of him, every tear, and every kiss, the frowns, the laughing that still rings out, like my favorite church bells. All of it is still upon his brand-new-time-crinkled face. He told me he sees every version of myself I have ever been when he looks at me. I cried. I know exactly what he means.
This much time shared with someone is a blessing, a taste of whatever is called heaven. Even if we do not get another minute, I think these twenty-two years we lived inside are a miracle.
A bit more of us…
Your reading of the Mast means the world to me. To further support me and my work you could be a raven…
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Why is it called Bird on a Mast?
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The Second Raven
I have always loved folktales and legends. They let us peek into what matters. They let us find ourselves in new and curious places. They let us imagine.