How Five Years in Reality Make No Difference.

She was five years his senior but he or she just didn't seem to care that much. I mean, in reality they didn't care at all. Not one bit.

Except once, while they were sitting in a park on a hill in some green grass he thought about the fact that when she was seven and running and scrapping her hands and knees he was only two and that he would have, at that time, had no idea as to how to go about scrapping his hands. Or for that matter how to run quickly with bent knees or with a proper stride or with the mindset of being the fastest in the pack. All he knew at that time was that he had only recently moved from crawling and learning how to walk to being able to stand on his own. But at this moment, with her hand on his knee, there was nothing more to think about. Because now he was the one that would be picking her up when she fell and scraped her knees.

So on Saturday mornings they would leave their small house on 25th and walk to the coffee shop and sit on that old couch and rest and talk about her favorite flowers and gardening and God and how they really do prefer hard cover books to paperback. They would watch and search and look over the people that would pass by and would wonder how their children would turn out and if they too would wonder aimlessly through street corner coffee shops. They both agreed that their hope was that they would.

And the more they lived their lives together and the more that their dreams aligned and coincided with one another’s the more they realized that those five years had shrunken to one week. And that one-week turned into one day and that day into hours and the hours into minutes and then seconds until it was as if they had come from the same womb at the very same moment.

Sometimes, being older, she worried if she was protected and if she was capable of leaning fully on his shoulder. But all she had to do was remember that time on the dock when that asshole came up harassing her. It took seconds for him to step in, grab the guy firmly by the shoulders and remove him from her presence. It smelled like he had been drinking. She thought him to be homeless. But in that moment, with her love in a very real sense rescuing her, she felt very much that he was the older of the two. That he was fifty thousand years older than her and that he was wise and strong and brave over all other men on earth. He was Napoleon. He was Attila the Hun. He was Jesus. He could rise from the dead if he wanted to.

Those five years were history. Those five years were reverse. Those five years had actually been added to his life. He was older than her. That’s how she felt. She loved this feeling.

When they started dating all of their friends would talk about the age thing and how strange it was and they would ask if it bothered them. It was like this for the first six months or so and it distressed them a lot and they had to talk through it and churn over it and deal with it. But after that first year people stopped asking about it and talking about it because of how much more in love they seemed than all of their other friends. The questions stopped and no one talked in the corners of rooms at parties anymore because of the fact that their relationship, their love, made everyone else’s seem like a playground fling. Some couples started asking to have lunch dates with them and asked them about happiness and how to keep love strong and alive and sometimes the age thing would come up but not often.

When they had been married it was very much a different affair then most of their friends weddings that they had been to. She was at a stage in life where she didn’t really care about the flowers on the tables or the dangly things that would hang from the awning that covered the doors to the church. She just wanted them to be together and to wear matching rings. And he just wanted her to be happy and filled with joy, so whatever she wanted he would agree with and nod his head and he loved all of it. He loved not caring. But it wasn’t that kind of not caring to where he was neglectful. No, it was the type of not caring that let’s someone you love be free to the fullest extent of the word. The type of free that can’t be defined in books or with words. She never really told him this, but she knew that he was like this and it was one of the main reasons she married him.