Only because his youngest son hears him first, I hear him leave.
Hears his father’s tip toeing out quietly at 5am so as not to wake up the baby who finally fell asleep at 4:30. The son I didn’t even realize was in the room. The son tucked away from the bed in a blanket on the floor. By his dad’s side – the spot that he comes to claim at 2am when he’s trying to outrun bad dreams.
“I love you, daddy.”
He whispers it in the early morning air and I open my eyes in time to see the window framing his father, a silhouette frozen by those words.
“I love you too, Micah. See you later.” And he’s gone. He went to bus stops, transfers and rides on the metro and then walked the mile to his office.
Micah is turning and my heart is turning around.
This man of mine, I’ve known him since I was 21. I’ve known him since I still fitted into a dress size that seems inconceivable to me now. I’ve known him since that summer he spent all his savings on dating me.
He used to say his “I love yous” with flowers. With rides of chocolate and river boats. With sundaes of ice cream and lunches on Sunday.
Now he’s telling them how the world tells me they’re boring, but every woman recognizes that they’re worthy of goose bump.
The “I love yous” he says now cost him much more than flowers. And last a long time.
They come with 5 am departures whispered and two hours of travel so I can have the car for the day. They come with a dishwasher unloaded and a tidy desk and study. They echo through two years of living in South Africa and savings have always returned to plane tickets. And over and over again.
They sound like hours spent wrestling boys on the bedroom mattress when I know he’s still got hours of work waiting.
They are ready to get up at night and comfort sick children right next to me. Regardless of the time he went to bed or the time he needed to get out of it.
His “I love yous” now are the laugh that still spills out of him when I make up my own words to every other song, the ridiculous we both still find funny, and the books that line one wall of our house. Since we got married, the books that made it through 3 international movements.
I hear it in the loud silence when we sink into the mattress that’s known us since we said our I dos and he manages to keep eyes open as I keep talking.
When he talks me down from mountains of my own making, when he rubs my forehead while he’s watching Sports Center, when he takes out the trash, orders Pizza delivery when he’ll be home late, or calls me out on my whiney-ness – I hear the “I love you.”
The longer we’re married the less we have to use words to say it.
I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.
~Song of Solomon 6:3.
The lilt and lisp and romantic inflection of love comes from the serving and not from the saying.
He married twelve years, and now I’m safer than I’ve ever been when I’m beloved.
Because in between the every day moments when we get it all wrong, there’s a man determined to love me right.
I’m hearing that.
I can hear it in everything he does.
