We collected anniversaries,
the way couples do.
The first
that sweet September night in your bed on your boat after the party
when you told me you wanted to be single
in a breathless pause
between kisses and I
madly in love and in too deep
said “um, okay”.

Our second
two weeks later when we headed up the hill
as friends who had… crossed a line
came down the next morning
partners for life.
How you loved to tell that tale.
How I loved to hear it.

And it seemed we were.
Two years in
we exchanged rings
on a mild September morning at the City Hall
while our mothers
dabbed their eyes
and we wept too, moved despite our scoffs.
It’s paperwork, we said,
so we won’t have to adopt
our own kids,
before realising that neither of us cared
for screaming brats, the school run or, quite frankly,
putting ourselves second.
But it’s nice to have it on public record
that you are indeed the one I want there
when they switch the machine off,
or request bank details
for my unspent fortune,
and mum sent a card every year.

It was Lammas last and your mother’s birthday
when you came
five days late and freshly fucked to show me
what you had known for a year but could not tell
til now
that it was broken
that you were lost
that you had spun a web, crossed a line, gone
elsewhere
and still it was my job
to find the words to end it.
I do not know the exact date of your leaving us
and perhaps yours got to be more of,
like,
a process
so I mark it there at mine,
which did not.

In the month since you came with your news and left
without your now-drowned ring
the rowan berries have puckered
and the rosehips have come red.
I have been and gone to you and your beach
with a song to the lost summer of my garden.
I have seen the doctor. I have drunk the herbs.
I have practiced
holding my hurt like a baby bird.
I have practiced
reading my anger like a letter from a friend.
I have practiced the hardest thing, that is
holding myself back from you.
I have been hurt and I have been unkind. I have been defensive and I have have been stubborn.
I have practiced
grace.

You have reclaimed our cat.
You have reclaimed your soul.
You have conversed with one who does not speak.
You have been and gone
again and again to the sea
with the birds, with the tide, with the sun, stars and moon
to find your voice.
You have spoken to me.
You have told me through salt rivers
things I could not see
and at last,
I am learning to receive you.

The mornings are cooler now. Night creeps in by eight.
After a spring and a summer of exile we grasp for each other
across the years,
shedding the tough skins of fearful
armoured selves
willing to be soft, to be nicked and bruised
by the sharp edges of new, unpracticed
needs and boundaries.

I bought myself
a cheap brass ring like a snake
to wrap my bare finger.
We never did have that dissolving party
but this letting
us go
as the geese come home day after darkening day
can’t be marked on the calendar. This event
has no name
it is just
our season again.