On the drive to the therapist’s office, the rain is beating down on us. We haven’t fully unpacked since our move back to California, so I don’t know where my umbrella is. We don’t talk. What is there to say? You speed along the curvy, tree-lined roads, going far too fast for my comfort, and I look out the window, hoping to gain some insight from my present state of mind.

We are each buried, for different reasons, under the haze of anger. There is low visibility ahead. Just for today: have no fear, the advice columnist offered earlier that morning. I ask myself, how hard could that be?

At the office, the therapist asks us to sit down. We lower ourselves onto the stiff brown couch, take off our coats. “Is it too cold in here?” she asks, as if there is a reasonable answer to the question.

In the book we once made together, there are many pictures of us. In the book we are young people, less afraid of love and time. I can still see your denim-blue eyes looking out over Coney Island in the middle of winter. I remember the pea coat you wore, the striped orange and black knit cap, how good the hot dogs tasted on that cold day, and the way you put my hands in your pockets to warm them up. Why didn’t we ever wear gloves? Silly Californians in New York, unable to dress themselves properly.

Now, here we are, in a tiny little office lined with books about anger and joy and the inability to express emotions. Here we are, skating out on Kierkegaard’s frozen lake of indecision.

It has been ten years since that day we called in sick and took the F train to Coney Island. You still have the bard’s eyes, but there is less confidence in them. We are parents, we are borrowers, we are traffickers of spirit and cynicism, of lightness and dark. We have seen too much, felt too much. We have come back from this war, torn and tired, our bodies worn thin from so much doubting, your body worn thinner from disease.

When will we get it back? The levity. The certainty. The feeling that there would be no one else more perfect for me than you. Remember our bodies in summertime, impervious to the paralyzing humidity, tangled for long afternoons in that 8 floor walk-up on 11th and A? Walking, smoking, reading, eating, drinking, fucking, sleeping. How long before that cocoon of unending pleasure undid itself?

You see, some days I have to travel to faraway places to figure out where we left the light. I know in my heart that it will make its reappearance, but for now it seems we need the help of some solitary woman to help us see it again. She will tell us things. She will share her wisdom with us.

This is what I tell myself when I go to sleep next to you at night: Keep moving forward—assuming that is, that you can still walk—into the long and descending but decidedly beautiful shadow of grief. Stop, of course, when you see that it is time to stop. Your nerves will tell when this time has come. The inconvenience of darkness is only of a temporary nature.

This is what I ask myself when I am going to sleep next to you at night: Is there a poem that would make a better song in your head than the sad one that you are hearing now? Is there a poem, at all? If there is not a poem, then you should find one. What good is your life without a poem? You can survive without money, even if you lose it all. You can survive illness, if you are lucky, but you cannot survive without a poem. I promise you this.

Please help bring us back to that light, dear lady with wisdom. How much can we pay you to bring us back there? How much can we pay you to bring harmony back into our lives? To bring the certainty that once was. To bring our young, careless selves back, the people we were before we decided to take a bite of the American dream—you know, the one that turned into the American nightmare. Can you bring the levity back, at least so we can look closely at it again, just for one afternoon, just for one moment?

Where that kind of love has gone, we have gone too. But we, the we that remains standing, or sitting for the time being on this uncomfortable couch, are still here. We are still here, and we will keep being here.

What do we know for sure about our relationship?, the therapist asks. It is a point well worth considering. We have not given up, we have just changed. All the things of the world have changed us, made us less recognizable to each other. All of the sharp edges, the imperfect feelings, transgressions, regressions, depressions, etc. etc. All the etceteras.

We know about music. We know about poems. We know about laughter, which we have always had a lot of. We know about children, about beauty. We know about death. We know about crushing helplessness, the long drive home. We know about hoping, and hoping, and losing hope, about waiting for things to get easier, waiting for the ship that never comes. We know about love that never ends. We know a lot about those things.

And we soldier on, either in spite of them or because of them, where the road leads to no familiar, and finally, to that room in which, when we leave the wordsmith’s shoes outside the door, we narrow down enough to be.

Happy Valentine's Day, my love.