I heard what you had to say about my age, my wife as well as the comments about my life and its lack of excitement.
Here is my response:
If your little High School romance is still going in thirty years come and see me, then we can talk.
Until then keep thinking that your make out sessions, the ones that you think prove you are in love and that your little hallway meetings are the pinnacle of what God intended love to be.
Then there is all the brooding you do when she refuses to kiss you as if that means that you have proven that you love her, no, come and talk to me when you have actually weathered some storms and then, when the skies clear and you are still together, then we can talk.
(until then keep your peach fuzzed face quiet because we are not on the same level.)
After all the prom photos,
after all the homecoming parties,
the graduation euphoria,
because after all of this is when the reality of now sets in,
then age comes and goes, then what you see in the mirror changes, then and only then will you come to understand how wrong you are now, so gain, I say,
“Until then young man.”
“Until when?” Said he with the bravado of an adolescent smirk.
Until you can say that you are still together when you have nothing else,
when you are dead broke and still together,
when you pass by her and she is not happy to see you and you don’t run away ready to quit,
when everything you have ever wanted is unnatainable, the answer is no and there seems to be no chance that you will overcome,
when she comes to be over 50 and her looks have changed and you no longer spend your days making out and holding hands,
when you have responsibilities that you cannot now fathom and there is no time for anything else,
when the starry eyed loveliness becomes clouded because the world gets in the way,
when you realize that love is not a feeling and that it cannot be measured by how much sex you have,
when you realize that a person you claim to love so much can and will act in an unlovable way time and time again,
until you realize that the one you made fun of is the one you will become soon enough,
until you have seen each other at your worst and stay anyway.
And…
maybe you can come to the conclusion that lasting is a choice and further that it is not a choice that you know how to make nor is it one that you have ever made, in your ripped jeans and lomng hair about her with her smooth skin and her untouched eyes so bright and young, unchanged by stress or worry.
Until, you have lived a life beyond these High School walls.
T. S. Deary
10/31 – 11/11/22
Pictures Assembled From Memory 