Their feet almost touch as they make a diamond shape with their legs. Between them lies a baby boy with his tummy stuck to the carpeted floor, his legs kicking and gaining strength he will soon need when he learns to prop himself up. He holds a chew ring, linked to his lips with slobber that sags like a telephone wire. 
She’s facing him, rocking back and forth on chubby knees. A pink bow that is taped to her fine hair flops with her movements. She wants the chew toy he’s holding, but she can’t crawl. Yet.
“He was up for two hours in the night, just screaming,” one mother says to the other. “I think he’s teething.”

Nervous, because he’s always nervous now, he checks the perimeter for the 6th time. He knows, he’s been counting everything since he sat down. Two bodies by the water fountain, four on the swing set and sitting on the bench at twelve o’clock, one on the slide, one next to him. He can’t stop the way his shoulders tense when a balloon busts or the uncomfortable vulnerability that he feels not holding a gun. 
“Do the night sweats go away?” he asks her, a fellow POW. 
“Eventually.”

The house is too quiet. With a creak she flips the lid of her hand lotion open but it’s not enough to fill the emptiness that claws for her. 
His arms are still warm from the shower when he puts his reading glasses over his nose and tucks himself into the sheets.
She keeps reading, and rereading because her mind can’t take in the words. 
He cracks his knuckles while not wavering his gaze from the black and white of a pig-tailed toddler.
She turns her head to him. “I’m scared. I miss her so much I want to die.” 
He squeezes her hand. 

They serve the best tuna on rye in a hundred mile radius and he’s been eating lunch there since Reagan was in office. He goes to the same diner when the snow is piled in the corners of the windows, when trends are changing, when good years are good and bad years mold his character. He’s dusty, and hungry when he walks in with corn kernels stuck to his soles. 
“Fields are ready,” he tells his father on the stool next him. The man who taught him weather patterns and gut instincts about soil. Who could sow perfect rows of stalks in his sleep.

I spent time today with someone I just met. We share similar backgrounds, have lived parallel stories, and our life stages are growing at the same pace. Our kids are nearly the same ages, and we’ve both been married over a decade.
It’s amidst the banter of baristas in green aprons, beans clanking and grinding, steam frothing, that we find each other in conversation that doesn’t need explanation. At least not beyond our own need to give a voice to our lives. That easy place where you know the one you’re with gets you, because they’ve been there. A connection with what is not said, as much as with what is said.

I love that place.