2,000 Saturdays

I woke to an arm draped across my chest. It belonged to a warm body that I was altogether familiar with. You could say there wasn’t a body on Earth, outside of my own, that I did not know as well as this one.

Sunlight stabbed through an opening in my curtains and overexposed part of her face. Turning her half-ghost.

She moved — turning away from me and taking the blankets with her.

“Are you awake,” I whispered, without taking the blankets back.

“No,” she replied, without giving the blankets back.

I laid there for a while–staring at the texture on the ceiling. Sometimes I could find faces.

There was a slight expanding and collapsing motion coming from the mass of body and blankets beside me.

“Sleep-breathing,” I whispered with a sigh to nobody in particular.

“Almost,” she replied unexpectedly.

Suddenly, she turned back around to face me, and returned some of the covers. A tiny gesture of reconciliation.

Her hand moved towards my skull and started to comb through my hair.

“Want me to buzz your head today?” she asked.

“Sure, that’d be helpful,” I said while taking her hand off my head and interlocking our fingers together.

“You never let me touch you,” she said with a playful smile.

“Maybe it’s because my mom never held me as a baby,” I replied, putting on my imaginary psychoanalyst hat.

“Maybe,” she said, “I sure hope you’re not some kind of sociopath. I’d hate to have children with you.”

I laughed and said, “If only people could hear our private conversations. They’d never believe we’re husband and wife or even in love. Who talks about stuff like this?”

She thought for a moment, “I think everyone does — in secret, you know. Nobody is as clean as they are in public.”

After that, we made love. The way loving married folks do — secure and comfortable and knowledgeable about what makes the other person feel truly loved and seen.

We were trying to have a baby then. But that was before we found out we couldn’t — before we adopted two children and made them our blood through the letter of the law. They were wholly us.

“How’s about I make you some coffee?” I said after we laid intertwined for half an hour.

“That’d be perfect,” she said after landing a kiss on my forehead.

More or less, we had 2,000 Saturdays together. Almost all of them were just like this. And I couldn’t have wished for anything more.