Joy came to me, has always come to me, upon seeing my reflection in the eyes of a woman. It’s always been this way for me, and I don’t imagine a world in which that changes.

I remember the first time I fell in love. I was nineteen, and though I’m forty-six now, and she and I are each much worn and weathered by time, I’m still in touch with this woman today. She’s plying her dreams with nearly the same enthusiasm she did back then, though with a far more singular conviction than she had in her late teens. This is a woman thoroughly done f***ing around. She’s one of the coolest mothers I’ve ever known, one of the rare women I’ve met who hasn’t had the most interesting things about her personality smoothed over by the demands of motherhood. Her daughter will likely be a weird, fierce beast of a woman, just like her mom.

That’s joy.

There’s the first girl I ever slept with, and though that came before the woman cited above, I didn’t fall in love with her until after that, because the universe is wicked and cruel. She saves dogs and cheers on da Packers, and I swear she must be a vampire, because no one should look like she does at forty-five. She later came into the same profession I did, and she was at the nursing home where my grandmother had always worked, the one where later my grandmother lay as a patient, struck with cancer in her final days. I was home visiting, and she (the girl, not the grandmother—though let’s not forget that grandmothers were girls once, too) shared a cigarette with me in the nursing home parking lot where the melting snow promised that someday soon, the winter would finally break. 

That’s joy.

There’s the woman slowly losing her mind and her heart in the backwoods near where I grew up. She’s always been the green girl hanging upside-down from the pine tree branch, the girl in my dream so long ago. She has mood-dependent memory like me, and she wakes up in night terrors. She’s the one most likely to look this post up to see if she was important enough for me to mention her, though she needn’t have ever doubted it. She’s at a nadir now, but it’s temporary. She’s learning she’s worth more than he thought she was, and she’s got a lot of work to do, but she’ll get there.

That’s joy (though it makes my heart ache).

There’s the woman too scared to love me, the one whose hair I made fall out from stress because I’m not packed in tightly. She has the sort of body men notice, and every now and again she acknowledges it, but there’s so much more there, an aesthetic to everything she does that shows a quiet confidence. She loves animals, and all her pets are broken in some way or another. She scooped me up—me, the sad, car-struck stray, and kissed me back to life, though we’ve never met. Scorpionic and dark, she’s never stung me except by showing how much I hurt her. She’s in a drifting stage of life, trying to put herself back together after a trauma that came before me. We were two broken people who loved, but neither is now as broken as we were, and that’s largely because we met.

That’s joy.

There’s my twin flame, who walked beside me awhile as we unlocked things inside one another we suspected lay fallow, but couldn’t know. The lights, newly lit in previously dark rooms, now shine brightly for each of us. Once that job of lighting the lamps was done, there was nothing left to do but part. She showed me so much about taking risks, about refusing to continue onward on a painful road once another path came to light. We share a history less haunted than most, and a dog who made the last year of our time together much less bleak. I smile when she calls and we talk for hours, just like we did before we ever became a couple, though we’re older now, and wise enough to know we don’t have the sort of relationship that beckons weddings.

That’s joy.

And now there’s her, the dark-haired, quiet girl who asks the most revealing questions. She’s not afraid to be open with me about anything, even the complicated things two people our age have inevitably accrued. She’s the first thing I think about when I wake, and the last thing I think about before I sleep. It’s harder to see this one clearly because I’m in it, and I’m cuddle-drunk and goo-goo-eyed so much of the time. We live in different time zones, in different climates, and the clock bends in ways that make for unmatched rhythms, though it’s not a problem. We each wait for the other to wake, and in that time, I think of all the things I want to tell her. It’s hard to remember she hasn’t been here with me the whole time, so there are interesting surprises waiting like the as-yet unpopped kernels of popcorn under the radiation of intense, magnetic attraction. Between furious bouts of excitement, I float in the dark pools of calm acceptance her gaze radiates, and she navigates my strange angles and sharp edges.

That’s joy.

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