Love will shave less important details like facts or presence. It will be young. It will lay you flat on the grass, staring up at a jet-black out-there, into meringue dance floors where fingers swallow hips, your head nearly skims the floor when he dips you, and your legs dance together so positive you have to call it love or religion. It will place you on sidewalks that lead toward away, a wake of regret smudged across the surrounding pavement. Your mouth will say, I’m sorry. Your hands, I was wrong. Eyes, I love you after everything. Your eyes will mean laugh, and laugh will mean forgive. It will find you at two a.m. in Wisconsin, when neither of you lives in Wisconsin, kneeling beside a couch. She is almost asleep now. There is a plastic gold ring in your palm. You are whispering, I want to spend the rest of my life with you. Or sometimes the couch becomes Nebraska. The floor becomes Houston. The ring is not plastic, or even tangible. It is just the distance of a protracted line waiting to be rolled into a circle. But it still is. And love still is a roller coaster, the giant wooden roller coaster at King’s Island, even though you don’t ride roller coasters, but she loves them, and she laughs, which makes you laugh, every time.
jon sands, from "Epithalamion: for Mollie and My Brother Jacob"
