Ordinary Joy

I do not ask for a beautiful life. Only one I am allowed to live.

A morning walk with someone who reaches for my hand before the world remembers to ask anything of us.

Coffee growing cold on the counter. Your keys beside mine. A Sunday with nowhere to be and no one we must become.

I want to look forward to something.

Not salvation. Not a miracle. Not some grand declaration made in the heat of almost losing me.

Something small.

A holiday where I know whose table I belong to. Where there is a place set for me without my having to ask. Where somebody says we and means me, too.

I want to buy groceries with someone who knows which fruit I like. To argue over what to watch. To fall asleep halfway through a movie and wake beneath a blanket I did not put there myself.

I am not asking for the moon.

I am asking for Tuesday.

For the quiet assurance of knowing Saturday has plans and I am in them.

For a birthday I do not have to remind anyone to remember. For a December that does not find me trying to make peace with another empty chair.

I have spent so much of my life being understanding.

Understanding the distance. Understanding the timing. Understanding why love must always arrive after everything else is finished.

And I have become so good at waiting I sometimes mistake the sound of someone approaching for the sound of someone staying.

There is a particular sorrow in having nowhere to put your tenderness.

In having all this love and no ordinary place for it to go.

No shared errands. No familiar footsteps. No sleepy voice asking if I want anything from the kitchen.

Only the promise of a life forever preparing to begin.

And still, each morning, some foolish, faithful part of me sets another place at the table.

I tell myself there is joy coming.

After this season. After this difficulty. After one more conversation. After someone finally decides I am worth making room for.

But the years have begun to gather around my feet, and I am frightened by how much of my life I have spent looking forward instead of living.

Because I wanted ordinary joy.

Not a love people would envy. A love I would recognize in the daylight.

One with a toothbrush beside mine. One with photographs I did not have to imagine myself in. One where the future was not a question I was afraid to ask.

And perhaps the saddest thing is not the absence of joy,

but how long I have stood at the door of my own life,

dressed for a happiness that keeps telling me

not yet.