Fourteen Years.

We’ve no time for poetry these days.
Medical issues keep swamping us; my cousin, my grandmother, little Rebecca, Gini’s grandniece, and now Gini’s mother.  Even Shasta our dog is fresh out of surgery from getting spayed.  And we have guests arriving this afternoon and Gini has to go visit Detroit for a meeting and my novel demands to be revised.
But fourteen years.
Fourteen years ago, we got married.
I’ll repeat, as I always do in such circumstances: I never thought I’d get married in the first place.  Like so many punky twenty-somethings, I thought I’d die before I hit thirty, and if I did live, well, I was too unlovable and chaotic to find someone who I’d settle down with and be happy.  And if I did settle down, I’d doubtlessly be a miserable, cheating fuck.
Yet no.  What I have with Gini is an amazing life, where she makes me smarter and kinder and more empathetic, and I can’t believe that my filthy past has been rewarded with something as grand as this.  We’re stuck hip-deep in life now, and we don’t have time for flowers or romance, but what we have is a ton of affection and a ton of cuddles.
That’ll do.