When Abby and I first fell in love, we had hundreds of miles and a million obstacles keeping us apart. The facts laid out in front of us made a future together seem impossible. So we’d tell each other about the true and beautiful unseen order we felt pressing through our skin. Our imaginings always included each other and the water.

Abby wrote this to me from the other coast, one evening before she fell asleep:

“It’s early in the morning and I’m sitting on our dock watching the sunrise. I look and see you in your pajamas, still sleepy, walking toward me, holding two mugs of coffee. We just sit there on the dock together, my back against the piling, your back against my chest, watching the fish jump and the sun rise. We have nowhere to be but together.”

The harder things became, the more often we’d return to that morning Abby had imagined for us. That dock, her, me, two steaming mugs of coffee: That image became our unseen order, guiding us forward. We had faith.

A year later, Abby made dinner for the six of us: the kids, Craig, and me. We all sat down to eat on the back porch of the home off the Gulf of Mexico that Abby and I bought together. It was a gorgeous evening, the sky all purples and oranges and the breeze steady and warm. We ate and laughed and then cleared the table together. Craig left for his Sunday-evening soccer game, and the kids finished the dishes and then sat down on the couch to watch a show. Honey, our bulldog, snuggled up on Amma’s lap, and Abby walked outside to our dock: the Doyle Melton Wamdock. I watched from inside as she sat down with her back against a piling and looked out at the canal. I poured two hot teas and walked out to join her. She looked back toward me, and by her smile, I knew she was remembering. We sat on the dock together, my back against her chest, her back against the piling, and we watched the fish jump while the sun set and the sky celebrated in deeper and deeper purples.

Before we went back inside, I snapped a picture of us, smiling with the sun setting behind us, and later I posted it. Someone commented, “Gah. You’re so lucky to have each other and this life.”

I replied, “It’s true. We are terribly lucky. It is also true that we imagined this life before it existed and then we each gave up everything for the one-in-a-million chance that we might be able to build it together. We did not fall into this world we have now, we made it. I’ll tell you this: The braver I am, the luckier I get.”

I used to hate romantic movies. When they came on the television, I’d feel achy, like I was looking at pictures of a party I hadn’t been invited to. I’d remind myself that romantic love is just Disney bullshit, but I’d always feel a yearning right before changing the channel.

Like the yearning that Abby, who is agnostic, feels when she watches a church choir with their robes and deep voices and shiny eyes.

I’ve always had shiny eyes about divine love; I’m a believer.

Abby has always had shiny eyes about romantic love; she’s a believer.

Abby’s favorite movies are Romeo + Juliet and The Notebook. The NOTEBOOK. When I say to her, “I cannot believe we found each other,” she says, “I can. I knew you were out there the whole time.”

I didn’t know. I didn’t know about romantic love because I didn’t fall in love until I was forty years old. There I was, just walking down the street of my life, when I fell into a rabbit hole. This is why they call it falling in love, because there is suddenly no solid ground beneath you anymore.

When I fell in love, I felt a lot like I did when I ate hallucinogenic mushrooms with my friends in college. When the mushrooms kicked in, we’d fall into the rabbit hole together. Suddenly I’d feel utterly connected to the people I was tripping with and equally disconnected from everyone sober. My friends and I were in a bubble of love, and no one else could reach us or understand us. I felt sorry for the sober people. They didn’t know what we knew or feel what we felt or love like we loved. We called them the normal people. “Be careful,” we’d whisper to each other when one of them would approach. “She’s normal.”

For a long while, that was how I felt about everyone who was not me and Abby. I’d look at folks walking down the street and think: They don’t even know. We are special, and they are so…normal. The only normal person I could even speak to during those early days was my sister. She talked to me back then exactly like she’d talked to me when I was a drunk. She’d cock her head to the side and say things like “Be careful, Sissy. You don’t really know what you’re doing right now.”

I’d think: Oh my gosh. She thinks this is a phase. She doesn’t understand that I have found love and so now I am different and special forever. This is what I’ve been missing. This is why life has been hard for me: because I didn’t have this one thing. Now I am better. This is who I am now. I am meandAbby.

One night, Abby and I were sitting on the couch, wrapped around each other, kissing and talking about eloping.

Abby said, “We gotta be smart. Our brains are lit up like Christmas trees right now.”

I pulled back from her. I felt confused, like one of my shrooming friends had turned to me in the middle of a trip and asked if I would help her with her taxes. I felt lonely, like Abby had abandoned me and become normal without me. I felt annoyed, like she was suggesting that our love was not personal but chemical. Like it was not magic, just science. I was under the impression that our love was the opposite of the drugs that we had used to light up our brains and escape our lives for decades. I was under the impression that we were healing each other, not drugging each other. I was under the impression that we were Juliet and Juliet, not Syd and Nancy.

Abby said, “I’m afraid for when this beginning part ends for you.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve never fallen in love, so you’ve never been in this part before. I have. It changes. I want the change. I want the next part. I’ve never had that before. This first part isn’t the realest part. The next part, when we stop falling together and land side by side, that’s the real part. It’s coming. I want it, but I’m afraid that when it comes, when we land, you’ll be disappointed and you’ll panic.”

“I feel like you’re saying that we’re under some kind of spell and soon it will wear off and we will love each other less than this.”

“What I’m saying is that soon the spell will wear off and we’re going to need to love each other more than this.”

After a few months, I started noticing that our love shrooms started wearing off. I started to see Abby as separate from me, and I started to feel myself becoming normal again. That was a tragedy for me, because I thought that she was the thing that had finally saved me from having to be myself. I thought I could just be us forever now. She was right. I did panic. One night I wrote her this poem: