Ten.
Ten years feels like a mountain. So much can happen in ten years that people had to come up with a name just for ten, a decade, a monument to the sheer force of that which changes. Tens of millions of babies are born, children grow up, people fall in love, people die. Ten years ago E and I decided to go out, but ten years before that I was a little girl in Kindergarten wondering if my Minnie Mouse glasses and eye patch made me different. Ten is so big that it's sometimes hard to wrap our heads around, and then poof, it's gone. You're still listening to Fleetwood Mac while everyone else is talking about Nirvana and come on man, where have you been the past ten years?
The past ten years with E have been an incredible collection of
moments, the wonderful and the not so wonderful. Holding hands as we
walked along the Venice canals to arguing over a croissant until we're
blue in the face and ready to tear out our hair. Moments where we were at our best and rose to the occasion, and moments where we reached new, and previously unknown, lows.
Somewhere along the line our relationship evolved. "Yes Ma'am" as he
helped me make the bed, let me open that car door and putting on cologne
every time we went out became whoops I farted into your seat. Can you help me rip this blister off? Not remembering what privacy is.
A year in, I still don't know if marriage changed the intimacy of being
with each other. I know it made things more real, more clear, like
cleaning smudged fingerprints off the glasses that you were already
wearing, even if they were too cloudy to see out of. It's given us a
drive towards a future that has become so close I can almost touch it
and changed the last bit of "me" to "us".
We joke all the time that our honeymoon phase ended in year three. We
moved past the starry eyed, never arguing phase into a place I don't
think either of us expected to find ourselves. Who really thinks that
they're going to marry their high school sweetheart, that the person you are at 15 will be just as attractive and compatible as the person you are at 25?
That the person you take to prom in his rental suit and grocery store
corsage will be the one who waits for you in his tailored suit at the
alter?
What's even more incredible to me is not that we've changed, but how
it happened. Neither of us is the same person we used to be. Our hopes,
dreams and goals have evolved. Our strengths and weaknesses adjusted,
our sense of humor more refined (or so we'd like to think). We're not
the same children we were when we first fell in love, we're not even the
same adolescents we were when we reevaluated our relationship with all
it's flaws and imperfections and decided we wanted to try and make it
work. But like the elusive word that you just can't find on the tip of
your tongue, one breath of the terrible cologne E used to wear at 17 can
bring everything crashing back down like it was yesterday.
E still makes me laugh like he used to when I was riding in his beat up,
oil leaking station wagon. A smile and sweet word still carries my
heart into the back of my throat. It was sad to see the days of blushes and hidden bodily functions fade into the past. Everyone likes to be wined and dined, to breathe in and savor that moment of anticipation before he tells you something new or you divulge a special secret. But then you wake up one morning and realize that you're working towards the same future, that you're playing for the same team and no matter how you screw up you have each others back because you have each other and that's all that matters. You become each others secret keeper and story teller and even though you know the words, the ending is just as exciting as the first time you heard it. That's more precious than I could have ever imagined and even though my seat will probably smell like farts tomorrow, I wouldn't have it any other way.
Happy First and Tenth Anniversary E. Here's to the next ten. Here's to our future.
