Two Decades.

I never really wanted to.

When he asked me, wind whipping my hair into knots, the fly of our tent unstakeable, the round river rocks pressing into my shoulder blades and hips, I said: Are you going to let me up if I say no? He laughed. He did not move. I said yes.

Seven months before that, I had told him: Whatever question you’re trying to ask me, the answer is yes. He made me a salad with wild things, led me over moss-covered fallen trees that terrified me. Yes, I kept saying, even when the leaves were bitter in my mouth, even when my heart stuttered with fear of falling. Yes.

We waited until we had rented a two-room apartment in a converted government office building to tell our families. My sister asked if he’d given me a ring. No, I said, I don’t care about jewelry. He bought me a flute in a pawnshop in Rifle, Colorado, asked me to play etudes again and again. I said yes. He never learned to read music. I struggled through solos without an accompanist. I played anyway. She told me it wasn’t real.

It was two years, almost, before we stumbled into the courthouse to say: Yes, yes, we will. I wore an ugly blue dress. My hair was filthy, I had missed a nap. Our son was turning restlessly, endlessly inside me. We used a borrowed ring. We used a borrowed witness. There was no music.

Afterward, my mother took us out to a steakhouse. Until I learned that I was pregnant, I had been vegetarian for nearly a year. I ordered the sirloin.

A year after that, we had a proper ceremony, with rings and a cake that I baked myself, champagne and the baby in a backpack. We wrote our vows; I quoted Hemingway and he spoke about how much he loved my breasts. I can’t recall what we ate. There was no music.

The girl who kept saying yes although she didn’t really want to is a foreign country to me. I know my borders, now, I know the rushing rivers and the spits of sands that reach out into the sea, I know the roads and hills and byways of my heart.

Today is my wedding anniversary.

My lovely, unknowable girl, I wish still you had had the courage to say no.