The Strange Telepathy Of Nineteen Years

We are at a delicatessen with two out-of-town friends. My wife has her sandwich in both hands, raising it to her mouth.

“Oh, they have pierogies here!” says the friend.

My wife lowers the sandwich.

Because my wife knows that whenever someone mentions pierogies, I will suggest they go to my favorite polish restaurant in town, which has Cleveland’s finest pierogies. But my wife also knows that I can never remember the name of the restaurant, and she does not want to try to answer my impending question through a mouthful of grilled cheese, so she takes the sandwich out of her mouth.

“You want good pierogies?” I say, right on cue. “The best pierogies in town are at… uh…” I turn to Gini.

“Sokolowski’s,” she says, and takes a huge bite out of her sandwich.

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We’re driving in the car, also with a friend.

“Oh!” she exclaims. “On our way home – ”

“Yeah,” I reply.

“But we – ”

“It’s okay,” I reassure her.

“I love you,” she says.

“I’m pretty sure you guys had a conversation,” my friend says, baffled, “But you didn’t use words.”

(We stop to battle in a couple of Pokemon gyms on the way home, even though I have to get to work. Because that, of course, is what the conversation is about.)

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I am at home, alone, because my wife has gone to Seattle for three weeks, seeing friends and lovers alike, and I am worried that she’ll never want to return. After all, she’s out in the wilderness, which she loves and I hate, and she’s having wild road trip adventures, and it’s been almost two weeks and I’m not telling her how much I miss her because Jesus, I’m just used to having her to share jokes with and I ache for her all the time.

She can’t miss me as much as I miss her. How could she? She’s on a vacation, I’m stuck at home alone.

What I don’t know is that even as I fret, she’s made the decision to cut the trip short and come home a few days early because she misses her weasel, and she is barreling down the freeway singing John Denver tunes about coming home.

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We have an annual schedule of things that anchor our lives here: there’s the RV show, the Meyers’ Bread and Soup party, the Detroit conventions, the Marvel and Star Wars premiere night, and of course – the most important day of all – my birthday.

We have the regular rhythms of our friends and lovers dropping by, guests staying at our house so frequently that we have two guest bedrooms.

We have the erratic streams of our favorite shows – Gini and her deep love for Inkmaster, my crazed love for Battlebots, the way Westworld and Game of Thrones caps our Sunday nights.

My life is intertwined with her in all the best ways. She supports me in my writing; I support her in her quilting. We walk the dog. We bicker.

And above all, we have our secret language humming between us, that shared accretion of decades of in-jokes and understandings, the years of arguments and misunderstandings decaying into a rich loam from which deep roots have grown. We have words for the tough times, but so much of what we do is signaled in body language, in anticipations, in reading pauses.

As of today, we’ve been married for nineteen years, which seems impossible. I was a wildly immature kid at the age of thirty, someone prone to self-destructive impulses, a pure selfishness cloaked in the guise of sacrifice. And yet somehow, thanks to Gini’s tempering impulses, I’ve matured into something I can, on most days, be proud of – and I know she’d say the same thing about herself.

It seems impossible. Then I think of our secret conversations:

“Ya wanna?”

“Yeah.”

And depending on what that inflection and time of day that is, that “Ya wanna?” is either sex, or YouTube videos, or a Pokemon go raid, or a dog walk, and we fill in our own Mad Libs because we have studied each other with love so thoroughly that we know.

I love you, Gini.

And I hope to for another nineteen years.

By then, nobody will understand us.