Wherever We May Meet

Where the rivers meet the fields, you’ll find me, lover.

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Waiting for you with my fingers trailing in the shallow water, the babbling of the stream matching the rhythm of my heart, which always races when I think of you.

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Your fields are green and growing, and don’t you dare worry about running late. I could lay in your moss and baby’s breath for hours, lose myself somewhere between the clovers and chrysanthemums. I would wait seasons for you, whether ice kisses my surface or snowmelt makes me overflow, I will be here, caressing the banks of me that blend into the rolling hills of you.

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Who needs wedding vows when we have decades of slowly bending and eroding and growing to fit each other? Every pebble I toss onto your shores is a ring, every bud you drop into my current is a veil. We are wed a thousand times over, and every day I say I do, I do.

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Today I will say it again, gathering up my tributaries like skirts around legs. I’m unsteady on them yet, and I know you will tease, as the wind you know so well explores your newly grown hair, woven with all of your favourite weeds.

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Tomorrow, some strangers might wander through our little world, wondering at how happy the stream looks, picking flowers from your bridal bouquet to braid into each other’s hair, not knowing they’re walking through the wake of days and weeks and years of weddings until they get home and find rice and rose petals in their shoes.

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By then, we’ll already be running through rolling hills, hand in hand, stream in soil. Let our honeymoon take us to the ocean, to fields with blooms in colours we will name after each other, rivers that race with a language all our own.

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We will settle down again, I’m sure. We always do. But fields are meant to stretch, to roll, and streams are made for running, for singing.

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I will return and return and wait here for you, my bride. Together, we will build a world in our image, capture the softness of each other in these sands and these stems.

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Come, let us weave garlands and delicate flower crowns, learn with new forms how to say the same old words — I love you, I love you, I do.

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