I would like to enjoy an ordinary life with just you and me and a small yellow house sans clichéd white picket fences, decorated by vines and bordered by an imperfect yard sprinkled with wildflowers and poppies, with foggy-white-paned windows framed by thick wooden shutters for us to watch birds fly by. This life has offered us so little and defines itself by experience, so I propose we create something kind as a pair instead of endeavoring to do so alone.
A smaller home is built on nooks and crannies, places to collect dust. Inside our home you and I would find safety in those sacred vacancies where our hidden ambitions could come to pass: My misplaced energy expended on spinach or flowers or chives grown in a greenhouse out back, and your care poured into the boiling pots and steaming pans on the stove. Maybe I'd have a bigger writing desk and a windowsill to read in that was made comfortable by an overstuffed cushion patterned with white and pink florals which you joked about seeing stamped on the curtains in my grandmother's house.
But the rooms in our home would not be so spacious or overwhelming that I would miss the sound of your melodic laughter or soft voice because I could not hear it from the gaudy orange, ceramic-tiled kitchen where I'd light new candles on the second-hand table you found while driving home from work last winter. You'd say the light of each candle resembled the glow of oranges in the summer which grew on a tree in front of your childhood home.
Some evenings I might watch you from the kitchen window as the sky darkened into a warm red. In the backyard I'd stay beside you, who'd be meditating in the grass, thinking of ways to use every minute of your numbered days, and reminiscing on memories that make me sad. Each star in the sky that I'd wait to wish on knows my existence has not been filled with meant-to-be's; I'd tell them how lucky I was to have found you while I lay quietly smiling. As we'd step on sharp blades of grass on our way back inside, you'd hold my hand to help me keep my balance while I tiptoed carefully around beetles and flowers that breathed quietly beneath my feet.
And on nights when you couldn't sleep easily, you'd find me sitting in my windowsill writing away. I'd watch you sit cross-legged below me, your head tilted up at the ceiling you insisted on painting forest green.
Although every opinion, particular taste, or culture might not agree at every turn, I do not think the pair of us would mind. Some opinions are not meant to change. I think we will assuredly agree to disagree most of the time. Love which came from the maturity of adulthood but preserved the quaintness of childhood sounds pleasant to me.
In our polite yellow home on a lived-in couch, we'd lay together, taking in all we know has yet to be offered. I will never mind if the task of optimism is done silently; you and I are familiar with each other's persuasions.
We could live together through this life which is only as good as we choose for it to be.
