The Choosing

When you ask me why I love you, I want to set down

the inventory I have carried like a careful merchant —

the way your laugh, the curve of, the kindness in —

all of it, the ledger I once thought was the answer.

Because reasons are weather. They pass.

The body I praised becomes another body.

The mind I marveled at turns its face

toward rooms I have not entered yet.

And if my love was built of reasons,

then my love was built of weather,

and the first cold morning would unhouse us both.

No. Let me say it the harder way, the truer way:

I love you because I choose to.

Because each morning I wake into the same astonishment —

that you are here, that I am here, that the world

has handed us to one another again —

and I say yes. I say yes to the woman you were yesterday

and yes to the stranger you are becoming,

yes to the gray day and yes to the blue,

yes to the wind that rearranges us,

yes to the rain that asks us to stay indoors

and look, finally, at one another.

This is not the comfort you came asking for.

The comfort would be a list, and I have burned the list.

What I offer instead is steadier and stranger:

a door I open every morning of my life,

not because I must, not because I cannot help it,

but because I want to. Because I want to.

Because the wanting is itself the vow.

So when you ask me, why? —

hear the small, plain word beneath all my words:

because.

Because I choose you.

Because I will choose you tomorrow.

Because the choosing is the love,

and the love is the choosing,

and I have nothing else to give you

that will not eventually turn to weather.

Only this. Only this door. Only this yes.

Only my hand in yours, again, today,

saying: here. still. you.