People look at me and they see an old woman. I am fifty-four.
My partner is fifty-six and looks forty. He has always been careful. Not cruel about it: careful. He measures his affection the way some people measure expensive ingredients. He gives good amounts. He will not be left with nothing.
I am not careful. I have never been careful. I love my children with a complete unrestraint that has added years to my face and I don't want the years back. I love my friends the way you love the last hour of a day that was good: knowing it is ending and not wanting it to end differently. I loved my mother past the point where loving her was useful to either of us, and I am glad. The rate tells the truth about this. The rate does not lie.
Strangers treat me gently, the way they treat the elderly. The young give up their seats. My partner's colleagues do not know what to make of us standing next to each other.
He has asked me, more than once, whether I could be less. Less open. Less willing. He does not mean it as a criticism. He is genuinely afraid of losing me before he loses himself, which he will, because I am burning at a rate his careful accounting cannot match, and we both know how this ends.
I tell him: you are trying to solve a problem that is not a problem.
He looks at my hands. The rate shows first in the hands.
I know what he sees. I see it too. I see it and I think: yes, and also this morning I sat with our daughter for two hours while she cried about something I cannot fix, and I held her face in these hands and I told her she was loved and I was right, she is loved, she is completely loved. I did not conserve myself for later. There is no later that would be worth the conservation.
My partner is afraid and I understand his fear and I love him for the fear and the loving him for the fear is also spending and he knows this and it costs him something to know it. I watch the knowing cost him. I watch him age a little from the knowledge of me.
We will not end at the same time. He knows this. I know this. We are still here, in the morning, at the table, with the coffee, looking at each other across the gap the rates have made between us, and I am still spending, and he is still here, and I would do it again.
I am doing it again.