Part 3 of 3
To the love of my life, mother of our two beautiful children, and my best friend, Ali. Happy belated birthday. I wrote these for you.
After ash, silt. After flood, a bed of quiet minerals settling into something that might hold. We test the ground — not with hope alone, but with plumb line and level, naming each fracture the water revealed. I will say the thing I kept behind my teeth: I am sorry. For the wagers that hollowed our pantry, for the blue sparks I mistook for focus, for the stories I bent until they broke. The nights you stood at the edge of absence, and chose to stay. We put those nights on the table like maps — not to relive them, but to mark what roads are closed forever. The old house died. Let it be buried. Its timbers were tinder. Its rooms were locks. We will not live there again. This time we start with bedrock. Truth before comfort, calendars kept without vanishing, money that has no secret doors, phones that are not citadels, vows we speak again in small daily syllables. Tuesdays — a gray couch, a steady witness. Boundaries — not walls, but levees with gates. We name resentment and let the river take it. We name ego and lay down our swords. We name anger and learn to breathe until it cools to something we can carry together. Trust is not a switch — it is scaffold. We torque each bolt, test each joist, invite the weight of ordinary days. We learn the good work of not keeping score. We learn the better work of asking, “What do you need from me, today?” In the yard, a small pair of boots splashes what’s left of the storm, laughing like bells at the levee’s edge. Inside, crayon suns find every page. A hand counts to five in the rafters, proud and breathless. Half-words climb the stairs at dawn, milk-sweet and certain we are here. We build where they can sleep unafraid. Let green return to the glassed soil. Graft new roots where the old ones burned to wire. Water the scar, not to forget, but to keep it alive with use. We keep a list taped to the inside of the door: Tell the truth when it is small. Choose repair before retreat. Touch — even when the words are stubborn. Pray, or at least be still, together. Celebrate the plain miracles — dishes, bedtime, a paid bill. Forgive fast. Ask faster. The cosmos still hums with distance between entangled things, yet here, at last, the space is habitable. Not empty — held. What ended was necessary. What begins is chosen. Eternity is not a sky we earn. It is a house we keep — stone by patient stone, flood-marked and fire-wise, with a table long enough for four and a light we tend every night, together.
