To the Woman I Married

I didn't marry the woman I fell in love with. I married the one who showed up after— after the butterflies had found somewhere else to live, after the version of us that only existed in restaurants and careful outfits gave way to the version that argues about groceries and sleeps with the window open in November because you run warm and I have learned that some battles are not worth the covers. I married you on a Tuesday in my mind long before the Saturday in the church. It was the morning you were sick— really sick, not cute sick— and I held your hair and thought: yes. This too. All of this. You are not what I imagined when I was twenty and thought I knew what love looked like. You are better. You are the answer to a question I didn't know I was asking. You manage the logistics of our life with a competence that I have failed to properly acknowledge. The appointments. The birthdays. The knowing when we're almost out of things we're always almost out of. So here: Thank you for making our life possible. Thank you for choosing this— the ordinary us, the real us, the version of us that will never be in a movie but is better than any movie because it's ours and it's still going and I would choose it again. Every day. Even the hard ones. Especially the hard ones.