I Cannot Promise You Forever, But I Can Promise I’ll Try

I can promise that I will kiss you every day that I love you, because your lips are so sweet and subtly tangy to me. But I can’t promise that I will love you every day – that your lips won’t someday become bland to me.

I can promise you that when you get home from work, when I can smell exhaustion on your skin and see it in your eyes, I won’t make you walk the dog. And I won’t make you cook, though I can promise you that I won’t subject you to my cooking, unless you’re okay with a grilled cheese sandwich — I make a mean grilled cheese. But I can’t promise that when you change out of your work clothes, when you nestle in the fleece blanket on the couch in the living room and put on The Bachelorette that I won’t sneak into the bedroom and bury my face in your shirt and inhale, because it smells like home to me. I mean, it smells like tomato sauce and oregano and, oddly enough, sometimes peanut butter – but really, it smells like home. And security, and instability, and optimism.

I can’t promise that a day will go by in which I don’t fight with you. But I can promise that not a day will go by in which I don’t fight for you.

I can’t promise you that I’ll be able to provide for us, at least not in the way that I want. That we won’t be living from paycheck to paycheck for an undetermined amount of time. But I can promise you that I will be relentless in my goals and my passions until we are able to live that way. I mean it when I say that I will never stop educating myself, and committing myself to work toward these goals.

I can’t promise that I won’t use your deodorant if I run out of mine, even though I know that’s one of your weird phobias. But I can promise that I will never use your toothbrush, ’cause that’s just not right.

I can promise that I will hold your hand at the movies, in the park, at the beach, in the mall, in the car, at a restaurant, in the living room, at the zoo, at the museum, at a concert, on a Ferris wheel, on the Subway, on a bull named Fu Manchu. But I can’t promise that my palms won’t be sweaty when I do. I can almost promise you that they will be.

I can promise you that I will be happy on our honeymoon. But I can’t promise that I won’t cry, maybe for only a minute or two, just as the plane picks up speed down the runway. And not because I have a fear of planes or of heights, but because no matter what, no matter the destination, or how happy I am with the company I may be in, I always associate planes with goodbye — to something, or someone, for however short a time, we’re saying goodbye.

I can promise you that not a day will go by in which I don’t in some way remind you that I lost the love of my life the day I lost my mother. And I can’t promise that I’ll ever love you or anyone as much as I love her. But I can promise you that if you think that this means I won’t still sit through your bizarre sci-fi movies, or pretend to be totally into your musty vinyls, and make you grilled cheese sandwiches, and smell your shirts that smell like peanut butter and mystery to me, and work tirelessly to give you the life that I know you deserve, and make you hold my sweaty hands, I can promise you, you’ve got it all wrong.