When I wrote about our wedding day on this blog I said something about how wonderful it was to be loved for all my ordinary attributes, for all the small and simple things that make me fundamentally and effortlessly me.
The irony in this is that our relationship has been anything but ordinary.
I met him when I wasn't looking. I was focusing on me, on bettering myself, and healing from past hurts.
But getting to know him felt so much like healing that I couldn't say no.
So I said something else.
"I'm moving to the East Coast."
I wasn't sure of it until I said it in that moment, and I couldn't take it back after that. Until I said it out loud it was only an idea, a thing I saw faintly in my future, like a light I knew was coming.
He said, "That's okay."
And somehow I felt it too.
We had a matter of months together. As friendship became love, I felt shaky and uncertain when I was alone and my brain overthought and complicated matters. But there was something about being with him that simplified things, something about the way he quieted my fears.
But things got complicated fast when he left to go back home for good this time.
I found myself crying on the way home from the airport. But somehow I never once felt scared that this would end things between us.
The only problem was that things had barely started, and they were already becoming more difficult.
The rest is a bit of a whirlwind. The rest is something I still struggle to wrap my mind around, that still makes my heart feel like it needs a chance to catch a breath.
We counted months apart. Across more provinces than years, we followed one another.
At some point we were apart for more months than we were together. Then that changed again and we were together for more months than we were apart.
Now I see him every day.
Somewhere along the way I noticed a pattern that made my thinking problematic. Instead of thinking about the fact that we made it, that we are building a real life together in the East Coast, something which seemed so far when we counted the days till we'd see each other again, I started counted the things we'd missed out on.
The distance robbed us of a few things, and so did the pandemic. I feel like I have been trying to catch up ever since.
I have felt this overbearing desire to make up for those missed experiences, the milestones we had to skip, or the phases we had to jump ahead to.
A relationship that started off so simple and natural became too real too fast. It felt like we had to decide on forever or on staying apart. In the end it felt like we chose forever in a hurry.
But that doesn't bother me anymore.
We did a few things backwards. Then, two years after a wedding in the midst of the first lock-down, we finally had our honeymoon.We went away, to an unfamiliar place, surrounded by strangers, in no ones company but each others. We walked on foot to another country, spoke with foreign ducks, and played mini-golf. We drank champagne in our hotel room as the sun went down.
We might have missed out on things, but, in the end, its not the missing that counts. Its how we grew, and comprised, and made things better; it's how we did things we never knew we would.
The milestones come even when their unanticipated, even when you don't realize that you've passed them until you are looking back and see how far you've walked together.
I'd walk anywhere with you, the short way or the long way. I'd take the detour; I'd walk the steep road.
I'd walk all the way to France with you, or cross the bridge to Luxembourg to have dinner by the river.