Occasionally, when we’ve argued, or when you’ve done something especially tender, I suddenly remember who you are. This day to day life of earning and spending, eating and shitting, cleaning and messing things up again, distracts me from the wonder of you. The wonder of you being there at that time and in that place just as I was. The amazing fact that you came back looking for me the next day. The miracle that you’re still here with me now. When I remember that it brings back another strange night several years ago when all the trials and troubles that probably should have stopped us from meeting, stopped from you being there with an open mind ready to love me, stopped me from seeing the pure gold you’re made of, came pouring out of you in an uncontrollable hideous torrent. You sobbed, for longer than I have ever known anyone cry. You sobbed for hours, in the dark, on a mattress, in my arms. I felt like I held such a fragile thing, as if it had fallen to me to keep safe some celestial being, or a crystallized fragment of starlight that had traveled through galaxies and through the darkest, coldest reaches of space and fallen quite by chance at my feet one balmy night in outside a Spanish nightclub. I scooped you and hid you inside my jacket, determined then and there to keep you safe for as long as you’d let me.
But I forget so often. I forget and we argue about keeping cupboards tidy (I don’t) and washing up (ditto, if I can get away with it) and what did you mean when you said that? (Usually, you meant nothing except what you said) So, we argue, you grumble and I get snide and sharp and spiky. Silly. How can you argue about the washing-up with starlight?