Taking our time

Alt title: Will we run out of things to talk about?

We started just talking. More accurately, just typing. We typed back and forth for literal years before a birthday phone call took us to talking after lights out on a bathroom floor. We were hooked. Long distance cards and frightful bills in the early cell phone days could’ve funded a few round trip plane trips each but we mostly laughed and kept talking until a battery warning made us switch yet again from cordless landline to cell phone and back.

When we were physically together, months after the first phone call, we kept talking. We went for walks (which are free and when you had as little as we did, free was vital) and talked for hours. We stayed up late talking longer, even with me on first shift and him on third, or sometimes on second. We talked in the car on our 90 minute commute on Fridays to work the land. Between rows we talked all day. Mondays we talked the whole drive home. We even wrote letters back and forth that we left around the apartment for one another to find.

One night, a few months into our new time together-together, I worried aloud that if we kept going at this pace, we would run out of things to say. We would fall silent. Long before gray hair and risen veins on wrinkled hands, we would be the couple at the table eating silently.

“I don’t think we will,” he pondered.

“How do you know, though?” I countered

“I just feel it.”

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Seven years later, or maybe eight, we were ready to buy a home. We had paid off the doctors’ bills on credit cards and saved and saved. We found a realtor and sat down in her office to discuss our Wants and Deal Breakers, our Must Haves and our Doesn’t Matters.

We took turns laying out the list of desires and she took notes. And then she paused, read her notes, and just looked at us.

“So you’re both agreed?” she inquired.

“Umm…yes?” one of us answered.

“Wait. You mean people come to these appointments without knowing what they want?” the other of us asked.

“Oh, yes. Or wanting very different things,” she stated.

“But…why? How do you buy a house as two people who want different houses?”

She laughed. She made some comment about that being part of her job. Then she asked: “How did you two get to this point?”

“We talked about it first. For years.”

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And so it went and so it has gone and so it will go.

That was one example, but again and again we have learned that the breadth and depth and frequency and duration of our talking isn’t common. It has served us well each time. We don’t end up in arguments about the size of a garage when finding a home. We don’t end up in spite or shock over an unexpected (by one person) big purchase or life change.

It lets us have space for pleasant surprises, like a favorite snack from the store brought home for the other, or a secret camping trip just us two, but we’ve found our way to those boundaries - the unspoken decisions that bring delight and belonging and feeling seen. Leaving the decisions that, left unspoken, would bring confusion or resentment or isolation.

You can still find us on walks, hand in hand, talking. Talking about the way that tree trunk’s shape looks like it has a nose. Talking about how to help the children come to terms with the plan that we will end up harvesting meat ourselves someday. Talking about the unbelieveable idiocy orinspiration of other humans. Trying to remember why this new conditioner smells so familiar. Running through what we know about this locale or that locale for where we might spend the next year or twelve living our lives, before inevitably hopping to where we would like home-home to be and when we might be able to get there.

I’ve believed him, that nineteen year old boy, for a long time now. That no, we won’t run out of things to talk about. Even as his beard grays and the veins on my hands stand taller each year, we talk. Some day, in some far away diner, sharing our Senior Special, we won’t be silent even then. And odds are, even then, my foot will find his under the table, and his hand will find mine, and we’ll smile for a moment before one of us says, “Hey…so what do you think about…”