All my life he’s been the most handsome man I’ve ever known. He still is, with thousands of wrinkles and age spots, even his yellow eyeballs that won’t ever turn white again because his liver has been the first to give up.

He still wears the ring. It hangs loosely on his finger, a sign of how much weight he’s lost. It frightens me more than all the other signs of his physical decline. At the same time the rings’ matte surface fills me with calm every time I look at it. It holds the memory of everything we’ve been through together and it’s as if one of those memories is unlocked each time I look at it.

“Remember when we got lost in that beautiful forest?”

Most of our conversations these days start with those three words; at least those that go beyond the daily necessities of food, visitors and medication. Usually he smiles when I ask such a question. He is doing so now, with a mischievous curve at the corner of his lips.

“It was haunted by elves.”

“It wasn’t haunted,” I protest. “It was… inhabited.” I smile too, maybe a bit more sentimental than he, for he’s always been the adventurer and I the thinker. That day in the forest I invented people who lived there, inspired by the moss on the trees and the magical light that fell through the canopy. As always he developed my spontaneous ideas into a story that involved the two of us. Our own little adventure.

“Inhabited? One of them poked me…”

The rest of his sentence is lost in a nasty cough. His whole body spasms as his lungs try to fight whatever is keeping them from breathing. Even after the attack subsides, he’s unable to continue speaking.

I hand him the water and he takes a sip from the straw. Disgust is written all over his face. Nothing tastes good to him anymore.

“Nobody poked you in the leg”, I finish his sentence as I take the glass back to put it on the bedside table.

I suddenly feel an unfamiliar lightness. This is a conversation we’ve had many times and it’s one of the ones I love the most.

In his loss of speech he shakes his head wildly, but I remain steadfast.

“You ran into a branch. And if it really was an elf, it was probably just trying to make you laugh.”

“There was nothing to laugh about”, he manages to squeeze out of his lungs before they return to coughing. ” It… w… was…”

He finally gives up, instead pushing his hand towards my face, with his fingers forming an almost ten-centimetre-circle.

“It wasn’t nearly that big,” I exclaim. “Two centimetres, maybe three.”

Again he shakes his head in determined disagreement and I give in.

“Actually the size of your blue stain is not the aspect of this story I remember most vividly. There were more important things like…”

He grins and I know he knows exactly what I’m going to say. Still, I lean in and whisper it into his ear as if it were a secret never spoken.

“To plant a thousand kisses on the spot where the mischievous elf poked your precious skin. And then to carry you over the tree stump you were so afraid another hoard of elfs would emerge from to stab your eyes or something.”

“Until you tripped.” His voice is hoarse, but clearer than usual. It often does that when we are bathing in our most special memories.

“Until I tripped. And I fell on you and you fell on me and I could tell you a lot about all the bruises I got from that. But I think I would rather tell you how much I enjoyed lying on the ground with you, your limbs tangeled in mine. I knew back then that I never wanted to be apart.”

It has always has been that way. I am the dreamer, he is the actor who makes everything more dramatic than it needs to be. That’s why, until recently, he was the one who mainly told the stories of our marriage. To friends and relatives, to the community, to me. Our relationship has never been entirely private. There is a political component that we have long accepted, even embraced. He told our stories to educate, to give hope, to share the hardships that life still holds for the community. Now I’m the one who has to fill that role. I imagine it will be the only thing that will keep me going when he is gone.

 “How long have we been lying there?” I’m not aware of the silence until he breaks it. He brings me back from my wandering thoughts, back to our shared memories.

“An eternity”, I answer, my own throat suddenly hoarse. “You were quite sure that the elves had already planned us into their urban development. When we finally decided on which building we would become -“

“A market hall,” he throws in.

“Wasn’t it a baseball stadium?”

“We were to become a market hall,” he insists. “For fruit and nuts and insects and…” The rest of the sentence is lost in a violent cough and I hand him the water again.

Normally we stay in the forest and discuss the life we could have led with the elves, but I vaguely remember there was more to the story. Something with less silliness and more real adventure.

“What I do know for sure is that it got cold very quickly, which reminded us of the fact that we were still lost. So we wandered through the forest, hoping to somehow find a path that would lead us back to civilisation.”

“We found it.”

“We found it, after another eternity, and it was so dark we feared we might lose each other.”

“But we didn’t.”

“We didn’t because you wouldn’t let go of my hand. Your fingers were the only thing that kept me from freezing to death.”

I reach for his hand and our fingers intertwine. I feel his ring press against my knuckle. As always this makes me want to to lift his hands to my lips and plant a soft kiss on his skin, right next to the ring. I take the time to give in to the temptation before continuing with our story.

“Do you remember how crazy I acted when we finally got to the village?”

He just nods, suddenly with a strange look on his face.

“I was dancing and singing so loudly that it was truly inappropriate for the time and you, my dear clown and always-the-loud-one, had to shush me. I wasn’t very understanding at first, being so grateful to be back in civilisation, but I eventually gave in. And so we were both very quiet and appropriate when we arrived at our inn.”

He coughs, and it is only in that moment that I remember how this story ended. I should have stopped it before, on a happy note in the elven forest. Who knows how many more stories we will have the time to tell each other. Or maybe it’s good that I continued. Such memories are a part of our lives too.

“But then,” I look at him and he squeezes my hand in encouragement. “Then they wouldn’t let us in. They threw our suitcases at us and told us to leave. It was…”

I lose my voice and he somehow finds his again.

“Bad”, he finishes my sentence.

“Humiliating,” I add.

“Very cold and dark,” he says.

I look at our rings again. They have been on our fingers long before either of us thought we could ever be legally called husband and husband. First we married, then we fought to be allowed to marry. I think it was that fight that gave us the strength to survive everything that happened to us and around us. That one night without shelter before we could cut our holiday short to come home wasn’t the worst. There was violence – sometimes words, sometimes fists – that we couldn’t run away from. There were nights in jail because they took us off the streets when we got too loud. There were deaths, so many deaths around us that nobody seemed to care about.

“Thank you,” he says suddenly.

“What?”

My eyes move from our hands to his face, and I melt at the way he looks at me.

“For standing it through with me. That one night and… everything.”

My heart pounds, not much different from when I first fell in love with him.

“Thank you too,” I answer. “For living this life with me. For loving me until…”

The word death burns on my tongue and I can’t bring myself to say it out loud.

It doesn’t matter, because he has the right word for of me and I know immediately that I will keep it close to my heart until death knocks at my own door.

“Eternity. I love you for eternity.”