Labor's Love Lost

I have oceans of time for those who actually love me.

The time I passed in love with those who were not you was time I passed getting ready to love you, and I can thank each one of them for his high school cheating; his quivering lower lip; bags of pot and “dude-ery”; late-night drinking and 19-year old waitress; years of distraction and backyard fucking; dependence and idolatry; indecision and wavering.

Thank you, I say, many thanks.

And I can thank my previously unswerving devotion to the proverbial Lost Cause, my younger, thinner self for her wrongheaded notions of the power to change. I lay laurels at the feet of every mistake and embarrassing blunder because here I am, walking hand in hand with you, smiling, out of a bar that holds so many punctuation marks of my past, without a look back in regret, without a glance of wistful What If? because here I am, walking hand in hand with you, smiling, out of a bar, something perfect, exactly as it is.