The List
Written June 3, 2020. A lot has happened in the almost two years since I wrote this piece but this sweet memory from such a weird time deserves a spot here.
I’ve been keeping a list in my head since this all started, this shelter in place. This quarantine. A list of all the ways he shows me he loves me. All the things I stopped taking stock of a while ago. All the things I was too busy to notice when life was normal. A list I started in my head 79 or 82 or was it 89 days ago?
It’s a big list and I’m already afraid I’ve forgotten half of it because I kept meaning to write it down but never did. He makes me coffee every morning - every single morning. And it’s been the one thing I look forward to most at the end of each day. The anticipation of the coffee, almost better than the actual coffee.
He brings it to me and asks if I need a refill and we joke that he’s a good waiter and if all else fails he can always fall back on that. When we were walking home the other night and still had that steep Bernal Hill climb ahead of us - I pulled a muscle hard in my leg— there was a pop, a pain, and I stumbled and he said he would carry me, he could never carry me.
You need to know this—he is not a romantic. He does not bring me flowers or say I love you a million times a day like others have, like I do to him, but he wanted to carry me home that day and he joked that we always thought he’d be the one to fall apart first and my heart hurt in the good hurt kind of way. Because this was him loving me.
He loves me a million times a day without saying a word. By feeding the cat, making the bed, carrying two cases of La Croix six blocks home on foot for me because he saw my stockpile getting low. I never noticed all the ways before. Before—when I kissed him goodbye every morning and left long before he got up to get ready for work. When we had only a few hours in the day together.
“I really like him,” I told my friend on the phone the other day. We were talking about how our relationships were fairing through all of this - “which I guess is why we’ve been together for over a decade” I finished. She said she kept hearing stories about relationships falling apart right now. Right now when the world was so heavy. But I’ve never appreciated him more. Oh sure his tiny shaving clippings drive me crazy, and the way he polices me if I don’t compost something. But I’ve never noticed the tiny ways he loves me. Not until now—not until the world flipped on its head and knocked us sideways, threw us all off balance.
I know this much. Tomorrow morning he’ll make us coffee and I’ll pull back the curtains and swing open the sliding glass door and we’ll hit play on what’s become a new routine and at night he’ll pull back the covers and kiss me goodnight and I’ll try to focus on that coffee in the morning and not the world burning all around us.