Two stones in a stream—
Weathered by time, softened by current,
Still side by side.
He watched them from the kitchen doorway. His mother sat by the window, cutting plums for a tart no one had asked for, humming a song no one remembered. His father was outside, pruning the fig tree with the same careful intensity he once reserved for spreadsheets and silent prayers.
They didn’t talk much that morning. They rarely did anymore. Not because there was nothing to say—but because everything had already been said, a hundred times over, in different shapes and tones. The words had folded into gestures. Into silence. Into the kind of understanding that doesn’t require punctuation.
In their youth, it was all noise. Heated arguments about burnt rice. Plans that shifted. Children who screamed, and laughed, and made their hearts ache in beautiful, unbearable ways. There were slammed doors, long drives to nowhere, and whispered apologies in bed with their backs turned but their feet still touching.
Falling in love had been easy. Effortless. The brain lights up, the heart forgets how to beat properly. That chemical—what was it called again? Oxytocin? Yeah, that.
But staying in love? That was war. A gentle, everyday war of compromise and forgetting just enough.
And yet, here they were.
Fifty years.
Three children.
Three thousand mornings.
Too many mini-arguments to count.
They didn’t match. Not really. She was erratic and poetic, full of contradictions and long pauses. He was linear and quiet, with a smile that only really came alive when he was walking uphill.
But they had learned to fit.
She still complained about how he woke at 5 a.m. like it was a personal offense to sleep.
He still teased her into booking tickets for trips she swore she was too tired to take.
They still disagreed about curtains, olive oil, and whether the news was worth watching.
But their days had found a rhythm.
The kids were gone now. Scattered like paper boats down distant rivers.
And in their place—
A kind of peace.
Not the peaceful silence of nothingness.
But the hum of something built slowly, without spectacle.
The peace of knowing someone will always notice if you don’t come home.
The peace of shared memory, of faces that have seen each other through illness, failure, joy, and mornings with burnt toast.
Wabi-Sabi and the Art of Lasting Love
Love is not always passion.
Sometimes it’s peeling fruit in quiet rooms.
Sometimes it’s knowing the same story by heart and still pretending to be surprised.
Sometimes it’s growing in opposite directions but finding that your roots are still tangled underneath.
There was nothing spectacular about them.
No grand gestures.
No perfect Instagram moments.
Just two people, who—against the odds,
Despite the fraying edges—
Had become one.
Not in some magical way.
But in the real, imperfect, ordinary miracle
of staying.
life 
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