I can imagine us together, some fifty years from now, with even more stories and nights of laughter etched into our skin, eyes weary from the many moons orbiting earth and earth orbiting sun. I can imagine you looking at me, a tough wrinkled hand in mine, with love still warming your glance, radiating through layers of skin and flesh and penetrating my core.
I can imagine all we have created and in my mind, it is beautiful. There are canvases full of color and memories hanging across vast open walls, circles spun of radical honesty leaving traces of empowered bodies wherever it has come bursting through, like a tornado, full of strength and tears. We have baked bread together and have warmed the hearth of distant homes. New languages have caressed our tongues and we have sung songs of intoxicated love across foreign cities and silent swaths of protected wilderness. I can imagine our feet calloused and worn from the weight of our bodies bearing down on the earth, heavy with babies then light again, dancing on wooden floors and squeezing tuffs of sun-kissed grass. Our limbs have creaked and groaned to bring us high into the clouds, on top of snowy peaks, or perhaps just up a flight of stairs. We have held each other’s quaking hearts after death has split open the ground beneath us and we have urgently clung onto life despite gravity’s relentless demand that we slip through the cracks into darkness below. We have chosen to live courageously though the lullaby of apathetic compliance has seduced us once or twice (if not many times more).
I can imagine that it is still a tiresome project to remain open and exposed to the elements, but perhaps we have relinquished some bitterness and frustration along the way. Perhaps what once felt like vicious waves crashing into our malleable insides has dissolved into a rhythmic touch and the cycle of moon pulling tides up and down and through our minds doesn’t produce as much mayhem as it does today. I can imagine a knowing smile slinking across your lips, gently opening their softness to reveal a mouth full of wine-stained teeth, when we recall our days of frenzied emotional expeditions, lucid dreams becoming real, and all the loving entanglements we lost ourselves in. I can imagine children, and grandchildren, and our collective communities igniting like the big bang when it created galaxies and stars, effervescent revolutions erupting from where there was once nothing.
I can imagine us together, some fifty years from now, still drinking wine. We will have expanded and contracted, only to find ourselves there, on some dusky porch, still holding hands.