Dear One,

You can try to call me out, but it will never work. I have been doing this for as long as you have, if not more. I know the rules. The laws. The disappointment is just another capillary in the bloodstream of America, and I have swallowed it wholeheartedly.

You have not swallowed it. You gave up after twenty-some years and didn’t take this picture.

To you, it’s just a middle-aged man at a sink, exasperated with his wife. I know. I know.

Exasperated with my need to document everything. Even a bleeding finger. To post it. To show the world: this is what life is ACTUALLY like. It’s not a picnic, a corn maze, a perfect autumn afternoon.

It bleeds.

But you wouldn’t let it bleed. You wanted to stop it too soon, to pull away the paper towel and slap on the band-aid. Never mind what a doctor would tell you, a marriage doctor.

Hold it above your head. Apply pressure. Replace the paper towel five times. Have the peroxide and neosporin ready. Yet, don’t remove the paper towel, the pressure, all the pressure of the world telling you not to, before the blood stops.

Just.

Wait.

And in the waiting, you will take the time to study the video. To read every law ever written about what we can. Do. About how horribly our immigration system has failed these children who stand before us.

And if you just waited? And if you let it bleed? And if you understood?

Then you would have this pic. And a chrysanthemum for a background, filled with color. And you wouldn’t have quit. You would have taken a snapshot of twenty-three years of marriage instead.

And you would understand where I am coming from.

But instead?

Let me just post my Scene from a Marriage.

Unlike HBO, this is not a Scene from a Divorce.

Because I see the beauty in making things work, even if the law, the world, the society tells me otherwise.