Love letter to my husband: The lighthousekeepers timeline

In my mind is another timeline, somewhen else before constant chatter became the norm and we could sit in the quiet for hours, and our movements were altogether slower and more deliberate. We are on a fog-washed island, or Scottish coastline, far from anything, tending a lighthouse, and somehow we've always been there. Maybe it's the desolation or the fog or that it's long ago before there were so many humans, but it feels that the world is just you and I. 

Source: Flickr

This story-thought takes me to a boulder down below the lighthouse, half submerged in the sea, where we lay as one while the waves beat over us- rhythmic, beating, pulling, pushing. Maybe it's a gray Sunday morning, or late at night with a harvest moon spilling a path of melted gold out onto the ocean that surrounds us, and we are spotlit from above. 

I imagine your arms, just as they are now, strong and perfectly made to wrap around me, capable of hard work, and capable of warming and comforting, just as they are now, with black sea creatures and swords etched on them, just as now, just as now. 

Still from "The Lighthouse" (2019)

The Fog Warning, by Winslow Homer

I see myself in long thick linen dresses and tall boots with golden hair just as now blowing in the wet wind, tending the garden by the rough sea where only the hardiest of root crops can be sustained, while you're down on the rocks pulling in fish for us, we have some chickens there, and maybe a couple of old and big hounds, wire-haired and wise-eyed, who curl up on an eiderdown by the fire each evening.

Source: Pinterest

Source: Pinterest

In bed, the flicker of fire and the revolving light pass over your mouth and neck and chest and when I can't sleep I lie there watching you breathe, such a sacred gift to my own life- you, there, warm, breathing. That in and out is the most precious tide I know. The same saltwater that laps at the speck of land we sail on in time, swells in my eyes, and my chest churns at the terror of time passing, which I hear with each passing heartbeat. 

Source: Flickr

When I'm in the car with you now, this present-day, sometimes I look over at your face that feels like my own, and pretend we're in our little boat, just off to do a chore or some fishing, and that there are no 9-5's or highways to separate us, or electrical grids to distract or speed anything up, and we're back on our sea, where I think we once were together, many lifetimes ago. Then I think, I found him again, and how no matter which tale we find ourselves in throughout eternity, if we find each other, we will find home.

I will look for you in every lifetime, and love you there.