By Christopher
Submitted by chris
Date: 2001 Sep 30
Comment on this Work
[[2001.09.30.15.38.14607]]

Sunday, September 30, 2001

Yesterday was Misti and I's nine-month wedding anniversary. For those of you who don't know, we actually met over the Internet--in February of last year, to be precise, on a website for love poetry. I was living in New York and she was in Bridgeport, Texas. It's a long and complicated story, but, basically, from the moment I read her poetry and saw her picture I was utterly floored. That was it. It was all over for me--and I wouldn't have had it any other way.

This is one of the first poems I wrote for her:

After a Night of Reading Your Poetry

Reading your poems,
I realize
that I have never really lived.
The thought comes to me
late at night
sharp and unpleasant
and there is no remedy
that I can see...
I would say I don't deserve you
if you didn't happen to be the One
I love more than I can tell.
You have done
what I've only dreamed and feared
in late-night verse,
in false comradeship with false friends
(3am trips to the 7-11 to buy 40's,
no other place open but the strip club
and Hell).
You've fit lifetimes,
it seems,
into just the years I threw away.
(Could this at last be
the long night's journey into day?)
So accept that all I have to offer
is me,
which is hardly you,
but there's this, too--
I think we have some understandings
so deep we don't even
have to talk about them.
I think we've stared
into the same abyss
and made it back
from some of the same dark places.
And now it happens
that I find you in that long night
and we walk together
into this present
and perfect
Light.

So we exchanged emails, then snail mail, then moved up to phone calls, which eventually became all-night events. We would talk from ten in the evening to six in the morning sometimes. Those were the best months in my entire life. Then, almost ten months to the day we first met, we were married on Mount Bonnel in Austin, Texas. It was a non-religious ceremony, with a justice of the peace reading an excerpt from The Little Prince that we had chosen. The setting sun illuminated the Texas Hill Country to the west while the Colorado River flowed several hundred feet below us.

We were happy.

We still are.