David and I have the kind of marriage that other people describe as comfortable in a tone that implies they find it slightly boring.

I have never found it boring.

Comfortable, yes.

Predictable, yes.

But predictable in the way of a house with a solid foundation, which is not boring but is instead the specific peace of knowing that the structure will hold.

We have been together for twenty years and married for seventeen, which means we have been through enough to know that the structure is real and not assumed.

Ezoic
My name is Ellen Carver.

I am forty-four years old.

I am a high school librarian, which is a job I have done for eleven years and which I would not trade for anything, because working with teenagers who are learning to love reading is the specific kind of work that replenishes itself.

David is forty-six and works as a mechanical engineer for a firm that designs industrial ventilation systems, which sounds abstract but which he can explain to anyone in ten minutes in a way that makes it seem like the most logical profession in the world.

Ezoic
He is very good at explaining things.

He is also very good at not explaining things when he does not want to.

This is a quality I have generally respected and occasionally found maddening.

The bed sides began before we were married.

We had been living together for a year when we bought our first bed together, a queen, from a furniture store where a salesperson had demonstrated seven different mattresses and we had ended up buying the third one.

The apartment had a window on the right side of the bed and a door on the left.

David had taken the right because he ran warm and liked the window air in summer.

I had taken the left because I was the one who was more likely to get up in the night.This made sense.

This logic was so sensible that when we moved from the apartment to the house, the arrangement transferred without discussion.

The house had a different configuration.

The window was smaller.

The door was in a different position.

But we were already David on the right and Ellen on the left, and so the arrangement continued.

We are creatures of established patterns.

Both of us.

David more so.