What the Canyon Gives Back

For Matt — ten years, June 4th

Matt —

I'm writing this with you sitting right beside me. The stage sits at the lip of the canyon, and a few minutes ago the sun dropped behind the cliffs, turning the whole sky the color of something holy. Everyone around us went quiet at the same moment. There are tens of thousands of us packed onto this hillside, and you know I love this; being in the crowd, watching from the sideline, not on the stage. I could watch people for hours: how they move, who they lean into, what makes them throw their heads back and sing. I'm a watcher by nature. What I can't stand is the other kind of crowd, the social event, the small talk, the having to perform a version of myself for strangers. That empties me out. It takes real mental preparation for me to walk into a room like that. But I can do it with you. You're the one who makes the door survivable, who fills the silences I'd let sit, who carries the part of the evening I dread so I only have to carry the rest. And what I never want, in any room, is the attention turned back on me. So you can imagine what it takes for me to do this, to step out from behind the watching and say something out loud, to write the most public thing I've ever written about the most private thing I have.

And the strange gift of sitting here is that it makes me look over at you and understand, all over again, why we're here at all. The beauty of this place keeps drawing me back to what I actually have. Not the view. You.

I was given a map once for where the sacred was supposed to live, in certain buildings, under certain rules, kept for certain people. I don't look for it there anymore. I find it in stranger places now: in a canyon going gold at the end of a long day, in our kitchen while you wait on something improbable to rise in the oven, in the particular hush of sitting beside you and needing absolutely nothing. Whatever the holy is, I've stopped believing it lives where I was told. I'm fairly sure it looks like this by now.

The thing I keep noticing about this canyon is the way it answers. You send a sound out into all that empty rock, and it doesn't just vanish;  it comes back, bigger, carrying other voices it gathered on the way. The most private thing you could say, handed back to you as something shared. That's been you, for ten years. I once sent something small and terrified out into the dark, and you answered, and it came back larger than I ever could have made it alone.

You'll remember how it started, because you tease me about it still. A hiking group in Las Vegas. A pool party, the kind of social thing I'd normally weather from the edge of, drink in hand, happy to watch and wonder about people without having to talk to any of them. And then there was you, and for once, the watching wasn't enough. I actually wanted the small talk, wanted to cross the deck and be in it, which for me is nearly a miracle. We talked for a few minutes that day, and then I went home and said nothing. What came next was a full week of quiet torture. Should I? Could I? I ran it in circles, talked myself out of it and back into it a hundred times, because reaching out has never been easy for me, and sticking my neck out has never once felt comfortable. But after a week of that, I finally did it. I asked you for coffee. It is one of the few genuinely brave things I've ever done, and we have been inseparable since.

I want to tell the truth about us, the part I think is easy to miss. We are not a remarkable love story. People want the extraordinary version, the against-all-odds one, and what we have is quieter and better than that. Two people decided on each other and kept deciding. That's all. That's everything. And it's the same thing available to anyone willing to stay, which is why I'd never dress it up. The miracle was never that we were special. The miracle is that this was always within reach, and we reached.

Here's the gift I thank whatever's out there for. We met late. I was 38, you were 31. We'd both already become who we were going to be; no construction project, no waiting around for the other to finish forming into something easier to love. By that age a person's life starts to show on them. You arrive with your history written into you, the hard years and the lines they left. And you looked at all of mine and read it as something worth keeping, not something to fix. That's the whole thing, isn't it, to be seen all the way down and have the other person call it beautiful. You walked in as yourself, and I knew you. I think I walked in as myself, and you knew me. We never signed up, hoping the other would change. We signed up because of who the other already was.

And who you are still undoes me. You have a smile that fills a room. You're open in a way I'm not; easy to talk to, easy to be near, with a curiosity that never runs out, always halfway through some book, always chasing down the answer to a question nobody else thought to ask. I'm the planner. The problem-solver. The one who can't say no, up too late chasing some project I'm too stubborn to put down. And you just accept that in me. You don't try to fix it or dim it. You let me be the person I am at one in the morning, lit up about something ridiculous.

I cook the meals. You bake; but never simply. You get this look, genuinely thrilled about whatever you're about to make, and my first response is always the same: What's the catch? Because no, we are not just having brownies. We are having brownies made of lentils. Ten years of this and I still don't know whether to laugh or be afraid. I love you for both.

You know when to step back. You know exactly when to step in. You are strong precisely where I'm not, and I've stopped being surprised by it. It isn't balance. It's fit, the kind you don't build, the kind you slowly realize is true and then can't unsee.

And here's the thing I'd never be able to explain to anyone at one of those parties: my favorite hours with you are the silent ones. I spend so much of my life bracing against noise I don't want: the small talk, the performance, the strangers needing something from me. With you, there's none of that. We can go hours without saying a word, and it isn't empty; it's full. Just the two of us in the same room, doing nothing, saying nothing, and it's exactly right. That quiet is the thing I'd trade every loud room in the world for. It took me my whole life to find a person I could be silent with. It turned out to be you.

We've buried parents, you and I. We've held each other through the kind of loss that rearranges a person; the kind that could have made us harder, more closed, quicker to keep the world at arm's length. It didn't. If anything, it cracked us further open. Grief like that either turns you to stone, or it teaches you exactly what the hours are worth, and somehow, together, we landed on the second one. And through all of it, we almost never fight; when the pressure climbs we take a time-out instead of taking it out on each other, which is its own quiet proof of how well we know what we've got. There was never much to forgive between us anyway. Only someone to keep recognizing, every day, as the person worth choosing again. The hardest thing we ever face isn't each other. It's everything else: the work, the obligations, the family, the endless small thefts of the time we'd rather spend together. That's the real fight of a long love. Not the other person; the world, always pressing in, trying to take the hours. And still we keep finding our way back to the same quiet room.

If anyone reading this needs to hear it: the good kind of love is not reserved for the lucky, the early, or the uncomplicated. It is not a prize for being remarkable. It's for anyone who stops waiting to become a different version of themselves and lets someone love the one already here. You don't have to win it. You just have to stay, and choose, and let yourself be known.

Ten years ago this June 4th, I said yes to a story I couldn't read the end of. I still can't. I've stopped needing to. I just know the sound it makes now, like a canyon at sunset, like one small terrified love I once sent out into the night, answered, and answered, and answered.

So I'm going to put the phone down now, because you're right here, and the light is going, and I don't want to watch the rest of this through a screen. Happy anniversary, my love. That week of terror, and the walk to ask you anyway, was the bravest thing I ever did — and the best.

There was never any question. There still isn't.