630,720,000 seconds & counting...

"What a happy and holy fashion it is that those who love one another should rest on the same pillow."

~Nathaniel Hawthorne

What can I say? It's been an exciting, breathtaking, amazing journey with this woman I call my wife and best friend. 

Two thousand and sixteen in many ways is a long way off from 1996 when we said our "I do's" before God and family and friends. Even further away from 1990 when we met and I immediately fell in love with her kindness and her humour and melted into those bluer than blue eyes.

And yet, what're 20 years?

A blink of those blue eyes.

A flash.

Just a moment.

A glimpse of the eternity I want with someone who seems to know me better than I know myself.

She's made me a better human. Infinitely better. 

Wiser. Stronger. More self-assured. I'm more comfortable in the aspect of adult and far less of the ingénu. Her confidence in me brings about a very real intrepidity and spirit that I do not think I would possess without her support, her love, her faith.

Yes, sometimes she is impossibly stubbourn. But then so am I. And it works. She gets angry and I get angry. But it is rarely at the same things, so we calm each other down. The things that scare her I can face and vice-a-versa. It makes for a wonderful balance of feeling the protector and the protected. And that is a nice combination in this world. (I'll give you an example: For her I swim in the ocean. She doesn't know it's because of her. I am deathly afraid of deep, dark water - thalassophobia is no joke - but I get into that ocean or lake and swim. Not to impress her or because I think she expects it of me, but because somehow that overwhelming, smothering dread I feel when the ocean or lake floor drops away is softened with the knowledge that she believes I can do it. And through that belief in me I am braver.)

That is me in the flippin' Pacific ocean.

I still like holding her hand. I think she likes holding mine. She's the first person I think of when I wake up and the last person to float through my mind when I go to sleep. Making her happy makes me happy. Thinking about her makes me happy.

This is terribly maudlin and I do not apologize.

We can talk about anything. Anything. (Politics, religion, death, sex, morality, fear, Brexit, bleu cheese. (Yes, even blue cheese. Which she still loathes and I still love.)) And sometimes we can not talk at all and so much is communicated. It's rather amazing. 

Come to think of it, there is a lot around this woman that is amazing. A lot around us that is amazing. And I am grateful. Grateful to her for letting me share in her life, her adventures.

I raise my glass to this wonderful, sublime, woman and to the 20 years I have called her "wife". (And to the 26 years I have called her friend.) 

I love this woman. 

I love her more than I can express. She's pretty special. And for some reason she seems to think I'm pretty special, too.

Happy anniversary, my love.  What say you to another 20 years to see what happens?