To fall in love is to disappear

On our first Thanksgiving as a couple, my wife and I flew to Santa Fe and ate green chilies with our turkey at Paul’s Restaurant. We walked the plaza under electric lights in the early evening dark, peering in gallery windows, savoring the feeling of being alone together far from home.

That next spring, we road-tripped to California and caught an insane desert sunset over Utah’s San Rafael swell.

“No one even knows we’re here,” I said.

“It’s just us,” she said.

In those days, the world was ours wherever we went. We put thousands of miles on my pickup crisscrossing the country to teaching gigs and to visit friends, listening to music along the way, looking out windows, talking and talking, and, for long stretches, feasting on quiet. The internet hadn’t yet come to our phones. We had no photos to post. When we drove off together, we disappeared.

For our greatest disappearing act, we moved to Lincoln, Nebraska—a place neither of us had ever been—for grad school. We rented a little house in the Witherbee neighborhood and planted a backyard garden and took our dog Mickey—a dachshund-terrier mix—for long walks, stopping to chat with new friends and neighbors. In the summer, we’d sometimes drive out to Pioneer’s Park, west of town, for fried chicken at Lee’s Chicken Shack and cherry slushes at the Dairy Sweet and a sunset glimpse of the small bison herd penned in a paddock there. Under a pink Nebraska sky, the bison wallowed in clouds of dust and licked salt blocks and dipped their gigantic heads to drink from a rusty stock tank. All the while, barn swallows flitted around them stealing skeins of hair for their nests.

In Lincoln, we had our son. On the night he was born, a full moon hung in the window of the birthing suite. I held my wife’s hand and comforted her as best I could through the contractions, stealing glances outside, tracking the moon’s progress. Much later, in the wee hours of the morning, after the final push and the cutting of the cord—after the baby had been bathed and swaddled and handed over to us for good—we lay in bed together. Outside, a storm boiled up. Lightning illuminated the hospital’s pebbled roof and the wind-blown trees at the edge of the parking lot. Thunder rumbled in the walls. Our boy slept on my chest, softly snoring.

After that, we disappeared from ourselves for a while. Work in Nebraska dried up. We moved east. Our son was sick with a chronic stomach ailment that reduced him to a screechy, sleepless mess of tears.

It was a dark time.

We spent our days driving to speech therapy, dropping him off at a special preschool, enduring his meltdowns at bedtime and beyond. Ten years blew past like that. If I didn’t have the pictures to prove otherwise, I probably wouldn’t remember that we managed to take him to every Audubon sanctuary in the state of Massachusetts, or that one year, at Plum Island, on a bracingly cold Christmas Day, he spotted a snowy owl perched on a fence post.

What we wanted for him in those years—what we have always wanted for him—is to fall in love with the world.

To fall in love is to disappear.

When you fall in love, you don’t just see weeds glowing in an irrigation ditch at dusk: you become them. You become the crack-filled barn thumbtacked to a field’s far edge in blue morning light. You become the snowflakes in a horse’s womanly eyelashes. You become the horse blinking them away. The line between you and creation—some big mystery smudges it smooth.

I think about our first Thanksgiving in Santa Fe and miss those kids my wife and I used to be, crisscrossing the country, young and in love, life a map we’d thrown out the window. Their disappearing made them beautiful.

Makes them beautiful still.