Rebel love

I wake up flat on my back.  My eyes unsuccessfully search the ceiling for something familiar.  Despite the hour, thunder rolls and there is the faint tap of rain against the hotel room window.  I reach across the sheet and find his hand.  “It’s raining,” I tell him.  “That means good luck.”

With total disregard for wedding day rules we embraced the day.  That September 18th.  Not only did he see me long before the aisle; he woke up next to me.  Sat right alongside as the hairdresser pinned dainty white blooms in my hair.  Held my hands across the table at a Mexican restaurant as I sipped a margarita.  Zipped my (periwinkle blue) dress moments before we went our separate ways–he to the head of the aisle, me around back.

We’ve never been big on tradition.

My girls walked with me down an aisle to the place where he waited.  And when time came for the vows he’d penned himself, his voice broke beneath the weight of words true as there ever were.

On a hill high in the Sonoran desert we were declared the real thing.  On paper official.  Legit.

We kissed beneath a rainbow.  With the girls we formed a circle unbroken and danced under the stars to Garth’s “It’s Midnight Cinderella.”

Eight years later–the point at which the skin of matrimony might grow tight, itchy.  The point at which his eyes might wander or my heart might deflate.  The point at which life might run thick and bog and drain.  The point at which either of us might look back or ahead and let slip an innocent what if?

Eight years later and still we’re breaking all the rules.

We kiss in the kitchen and I would swear my feet leave the ground.  Time melts away.  Dinner hour’s soundtrack morphs and twists to the slow-motion tick of the second hand.  The groove of his palm jigsaws the curve of mine.  The thoughts he speaks aloud finish the ones I’ve left unsaid.  The very beat of my heart echoes back in response to his.

And the two shall become one.

Biblical truth proved so, right here in this rebel love.