what is the name for the thing you always see?

Today, the deer are out on the river ice. Picked their way through the stalks of rust brush branches and then settled among them.

Their ears, huge.

Catching at all the sounds of the city rushing around them, the water, still running in the wide part of the river that has not yet iced over, though now there are floes free-floating and stripes where the water goes dark as an underarm around the lighter strips of warmer water.

Some of us will grow old enough to see that our ears never stop growing. We will pick our way gently through the later seasons of our life with huge ears too.

I haven’t seen the deer all year but today, here they are. Absence, of course, cannot be avoided this time of year. I dream about the last album he heard. I unpack holiday decorations and realize how many have not returned from the fire. I drift back over what has been.

*

J and I spent a portion of this year living in temporary housing because our house burned down on the day of our wedding and then he and I largely spent the next portion of the year consumed by IVF.

These kinds of events are exhausting emotionally, and draining in terms of time, but they are also expensive. Of course, there is privilege in being able to access fertility treatments, and of course, there is privilege in even having a home to return to, and there is also financial strain.

For the most part, this also means this had been a year of pennies, of small piles of them, of holding their little brass weights and wondering where those weights should go. At times, the reality of what the fire took for itself, of what IVF demands of you, the checks and balances of accounting drained our world of something—everything turning a little flatter, a little more desaturated.

We’ve had days where we feel as if we are dragging shadows around and then, inevitably, one or the other of us will wonder: Does it just feel like it’s all work, work, work, and worry?

And we will look at each other and realize, a lot of the time anyway: Well yes, that actually is it. That’s what’s happening here.

*

We’re good at the romance.

J said this to me this week. We were driving home from some errand or another. He sipped on a black coffee where the top note was strawberry (he would have preferred caramel) and I clutched a green sencha (perfectly warm).

It was true, what he said and also a little eerie because he had no idea that I had been writing this past week about this very point. I’d been trying to pin when exactly we began to romance our world but all I’d been able to grasp what that it was somewhere in the midst of those moments, desaturated and shadowy.

*

At first, we started by romancing the four blocks surrounding our home, as well as our home itself. This was not particularly difficult because, after we moved back into our renovated home post-fire, EVERYTHING was romantic.

The hidden garbage and recycling bins? Romantic.

The electronic locks (instead of cold keys that had to be fumbled with in -20 degree winter or left on top of cars and then lost to the slush?). ROMANTIC.

The familiar array of cracks in the pavement stones leading up to our home? Romantic.

The dogs that we recognized, passing by our window that looked, once again, out onto the train and the river? Obviously, romantic.

But from there, as the shadows began to creep back, as they tend to do, we began to romance other aspects of our living —

Trying one of the six different ways one can tie a scarf, as we head out for said walk around the blocks of the house. Deciding that the Parisian isn’t for us, or our hair, tangled into birds’ nests by the time we return.

The crackling of thin ice as it tightens on the tree branches.

A super-tart lemonade.

Maltesers in bed.

ANY DOG WITH THEIR SWEET LIL SNOOT AND/OR HEAD OUT THE CAR WINDOW.

Reading past dark with the windows open.

A very small bar with very low lighting such that I can barely see you and you can barely see me. Ordering only 1 thing off the menu that you, thank God, can barely see.

Sitting on a bench in an art gallery and eating a soft, salty pretzel.

FRESH FLOWERS IN A BLOWN GLASS VASE ON THE TABLE, PARTICULARLY IF RANUNCULUS OR ROSES (NOT RED) ARE INVOLVED.

Stringing our little patio with soft-white lights and actually turning them on at night.

Cards for no occasions.

Sitting on the same side of the table and close together.

Calling a pal and hoping they pick up. Or were free for a walk.

Black tea in a double-walled glass mug.

Little romantics, as I have come to think of them. Small but remarkable feints against the shadows. I offer them to you, in case you might need them yourself.

They are, the way I see it, all ways into discovering the name of the things we see in our lives daily. Those things that we see, and we see, and we see. It takes time, romance, and if we are lucky, we will have enough of it. These little romances are ways to stay in one season long enough to realize that now, a different season will come. Has come.