I Promise, It's Nothing Personal

Only twenty-five years since I took your name, fluorescent lights, a government building, the officiant a stranger we met that morning— no pictures, no rehearsals, just vows read like lines on a form, under a plastic trellis someone thought might make the room feel more human. My shoulders shook with laughter you didn’t get and still don’t. It came from some gut-deep knowing, like my body caught the future unfolding before I could see it. That laugh hit hard, spilled into my knees, a crack of thunder in the dead air of something meant to be holy. I told you not to take it personally. You stood stiff, ironing your silence into the room, flattening the wrinkles of your suit while I swallowed every word. Now, my skin wears its own proof, fine lines scratched into corners of my eyes, crow’s feet tracking down each glance you could never follow. Eleven years your junior, and somehow, I’m older— moments pulling tight until we’re both squinting at the same dim horizon. At night, you drift off beneath blinking LEDs, chin tucked to chest. I stretch the minutes, stealing them from a day long erased, rolling them like old newsreels, flickering memories across hours we no longer name. I wipe yesterday’s drool from your chin— twenty-five years of cleaning up the mess time left behind. And somehow, it’s still funny— how the punchline never landed, how I’m still holding onto this joke that split open between those vows and now. I laugh because I knew, even before 'I do' that none of this would ever be personal.