Counterpoint

If not you, who then? Who would I have groped my way towards, stumbled into, dumb and blind, who would I have played my clumsy counterpoint against?

A musician, maybe, an Englishman with fine-boned hands and straight dark brows who would always avoid eye-contact but whose touch would hum like vibrato in my belly. I would worship him and on a concert tour of France he would leave me for a younger blond oboist, a severe Scandinavian beauty who could cook pork roast like his mother. I would fall into black despair, rage, nurse treacly hatred for years.

Or perhaps a bushy-haired activist in faded corduroy, fearless in bright conviction. I would march with him to the world's capitals, chanting justice. I would become angrier on the outside, visualize peace within, give up my car, eat organic vegetables. I would take in foster children and be nurturing between protests. And he would be accidentally shot in Pakistan, building a school for refugees, and I would never forgive myself for not being good enough, for not forgiving him for being too good.

Or it might have been a college professor, ten years my senior—a Romanticist who could deconstruct Keats and bake rye bread in a large house with heavy wood trim. He would be proud of his dahlias, possessive of me, understand me too well. Eventually, worn down by an ego that kept me perpetually tethered, an orbiting satellite, my light a reflection of his bright mind, I would cut myself loose, drift off into dark space.

But I found you. And busily, each day, we compose this imperfect union. You do not read me poetry or cook me cassoulet; my mind goes blank when you explain steering dampeners. Your heart is often heavy, my patience thin. Against your ragged, stumbling bass I carve a shrill and querulous melody. The left hand ignores what the right hand plays until suddenly fearful we rush together and sing in this fierce unison.