Quick piece for Michiru’s birthday, ~700 words. Enjoy!

Perhaps I should have listened to Setsuna when she talked about
time. Yesterday, I reached for your hand for the first time, alight with fear
and desire and the dark craggy beast of youth. And the day before that, you
took my hand in marriage. That can’t be right, but that’s how it happened. All
the rest telescopes in between breaths, we bought a house, we had our first
date, the children went to school. It’s been two days, it’s been twenty
years— no, the latter isn’t any more true than the former, now. It’s harder
for me to remember the numbers, these days, and while it pleases you when I
tell waitresses you’ve just turned thirty, you’d be heart broken to know I’ve
forgotten this one. So… by the calendar, it’s been fifty seven years, going
from when our lives first collided. It can’t be right, surely, it’s far too
long and far two short, I met you last week and I’ve loved you forever. We’ve
barely stopped being children and yet our children have children grown. Setsuna
told me, once, many times, I can’t be sure, that time is not a line but a
fabric, it folds over on itself, and days many stitches apart may come
together.

You’re wrapped in a blanket now, tangled up as I am in all
the moments of our life. You stole all the covers the first night we stayed in
bed together, and perhaps that night was last night as I wake to nothing but a
corner of the sheet left to warm me. But it cannot have been last night, for
when you wake you will not be ashamed, and I do not leave myself to shiver on
the edge of the bed. I wrap around you as I have every night, every morning for
a thousand years.

You stir. The sunlight hits your hair and makes you blonde
again, time squeezes together all the more and I feel the urge to touch you for
the first time, to let lose all my adolescent desire upon you, your eyes open
slowly in their wrinkled beds and I feel tender, familiar, home, I want to make
love to my wife of half a century.

You look at me in the morning light, you see me for the very
first time. There’s wonder in your eyes.

“Well aren’t you a pretty little thing,” you say, too confident
and self-aware to be your teenage self any longer. “Come here often?”

I laugh at the joke you’ve never made before, the joke I’ve
heard from you a hundred times. “I’ve been here once or twice.”

You smile the smile I fell in love with a dozen lifetimes
ago, you prop yourself up as best you can and give me the sweetest kiss I’ve
ever had. “Today is something special, you know,” you say, staying close.

“Oh?” I don’t know the date, I’m not sure I even have the
month right, if I’ve missed our anniversary…

But you laugh. “Michi, it’s your birthday!”

I told you, I can’t remember numbers anymore. “I thought we
agreed I didn’t have birthdays anymore.”

“You said that, and I’ve thrown you at least five birthday
parties since then.” They all bleed together in my mind, a blur of cake and
family and the girls in party hats.

You reach down into your bedside drawer and pull out a
little box. You will not hear that you shouldn’t have, you never do. I open the
paper and peel off the lid to see a simple folding frame set bearing three
photos—on the left, a snapshot from a festival booth just after we started
dating, all nervous smiles. On the right is a family portrait we sat for, or
that we and the baby sat for, our older girl is barely still enough for the
camera to capture, and you’re trying not to laugh at her dancing. In the middle
we are as we are now, though I can’t remember when the photo might have been
taken. The three times fold together with everything in between them. I can’t
begin to tell you my thoughts, how perfect a gift it is, so I merely say it’s
beautiful.

“Happy birthday, Michi,” you say, and I curl into your arms
as time washes over us.