We “met” long before we met. We “met” in all those emails we exchanged, back when you worked in downtown Austin and I spent my summer interning for the Victoria Advocate so I could live at home and save a little money before I went back to my third year of college. I used to go out on assignments, interviewing my subjects as quickly as I could and then returning to the office just so I could read the email I knew you’d send in the time I was gone. We talked about songs we liked and why and which part of the day was our favorite and why we didn’t like the contemporary Christian world so much anymore.
I’d already sworn off dating because of a serious relationship in high school that didn’t end well, but that summer, you were slowly prying my hands from the key that could unlock my heart.
By the time we were supposed to officially meet on the campus of Texas State University, I thought I already knew you in the deepest ways a person can know another. I thought we’d surely hit it off, because you seemed to be everything I’d ever dreamed of in a man. I thought we’d start something that would race toward forever, because the only piece missing was looking in each other’s eyes, and I wasn’t a shallow person. I didn’t care about looks, much. I just wanted to find someone who understood me and loved me anyway.
Or so I thought.
And then there you were, standing in front of the Quad two hours after we’d planned to meet, and I looked at your curly black hair and those round Harry Potter glasses and the smile that could disarm me in half a second, but the thing that grabbed me and shook me by the shoulders and scared the hope right out of me were those eyes. They could see everything. They could look into a soul and know all the light and all the dark that lived there. They could find those places I didn’t want anyone to ever see.
And so I did the only thing I could. I ran.
It’s a scary thing to be known. We think we want it, but then we start going over and over and over all those mistakes we’ve tried to forget and the pain we carry from other people’s mistakes, and we think maybe it would be better to hide it, because we’d be too much work. No one would want our baggage. No one would care enough to stick around after all that.
We spent the next year as just friends, because just friends could know each other but never really “know” each other. I kept unscalable walls in place so none of my friends had to find out I wasn’t perfect like I tried so hard to be. So they didn’t have to feel how much work I would be. So I didn’t have to be “that friend” no one really likes and hates to be around. You see, I didn’t want to inconvenience anyone with my insecurities and my scars and the beliefs that would not let go of my heels and tripped me every which way I turned.
But the only thing all that work did for me was keep me alone.
I guess maybe I realized that the night we hung out with our mutual friends a year later. I’d just gotten back from singing the national anthem at the college girl’s basketball game, all dressed up because one of the junior coaches, a man six years older than me, had taken me out on a few dates and I was telling him this very night that I just wasn’t all that interested in him. He liked to talk about sports. I liked to talk about poetry.
And I came back to my apartment feeling light and free, and then you were there, standing with our friends when I got out of my car. I took one look, and I fell hard. Something had changed. You were no longer boy but man. A man I remembered falling in love with over thirty-six emails during a summer internship.
We spent the night talking about your band and music and what you wanted to do with your future, and I didn’t have to talk about myself, so it was safe and good and lovely. And then there was that planned double date to see Sweet Home Alabama at the local discount theater, and you set me up so I ended up being a third wheel all night with my best friend and her fiancé. I thought it was all over then, that maybe I’d slipped in some little secret that made you think what I imagined everyone else thought: Won’t be able to fix that one.
So I pretended I didn’t care. I pretended like there were others—and it’s true there were. A student government president who had a future in politics and probably only liked the idea of me because I was a reporter, and how powerful could a politician be with a reporter wife? There was the boy on the baseball team who used me for tutoring in algebra and chemistry so he could get the homework answers and scrape by with a passing grade even though his test scores were appalling. There were the boys at our campus ministry, who liked the idea of me but had no clue who I was inside. None of them were you.
And then, late one night, you showed up at my office door, where I was combing through the paper one final time before sending it to print. You had to wait to talk, because others were waiting on me and my editing, and then, finally, when the paper was free of every mistake I could possibly find, we left the office and you told me you didn’t just want to date me, but you wanted to marry me, because you’d seen my face on your walk home when you were thinking about your future, years down the line. That first weekend we made good on our date and spent the morning watching a sun that never rose but stayed behind clouds and then ambled along the Riverwalk hand-in-hand, and I drove home so you could fall asleep in the middle of one of my sentences. It didn’t matter, really. I would have a lifetime of talking.
Six weeks later there was The Majestic Theatre, where you took me to see The Nutcracker Ballet and I wore a red dress and you wore a tux, and you pulled me up on stage after all the dancing was over and popped the question and everyone in the audience shouted “What did she say?” because everyone loves a love story that begins like that one.
Ten months later was the wedding and the rain and all the crying I did before I could even put on my makeup, because this was the only chance I’d get to have that magical outdoor wedding by the lake, and we had to bring it back inside to that old historical church that held more history than we did. There was the honeymoon in the most magical place on earth—Disney World—and the way we walked all those beautiful streets with our hands held tight and how people beckoned us to the front of lines because they could just tell—they could just tell—that ours was going to be a good love story. There were those first nights in a hotel and the hands and the kisses and the love that spread its way to every inch of our skin.
Now there have been years, twelve of them, each taking a different turn in this love story. Maybe some of them haven’t turned out exactly the way we thought, like the third year where we spent time in a place that made us both miserable so we came running back home, and the seventh one that held a forever grief of losing a baby girl, and the eleventh one that carried such instability and security in terms of economics and provision and how much of us there is to go around.
But some of them have turned out so much better than we ever dreamed, because there was the first one, where we had steady jobs and young, hip friends and dates every Friday night. There was the tenth one, where we hardly had any money but we had enough to go back to that magical place where our marriage had first begun, even if it was only for a couple of days. There is this twelfth one, when we are living into a new definition of hope.
So even though we’ve seen ups and downs and pain and pleasure all in equal measure, there is not a moment I would have changed. Not one. Because all of them were spent with you, and even after all this time, I would still choose you.
It doesn’t matter that we are twelve years older than we were when we first stood in front of two hundred people and promised our love, you reading a poem from memory, me reading from six notecards. It doesn’t matter that we have become completely different people today. I loved who you were then, and I love who you have become.
Sometimes we love each other well, and sometimes we just don’t, but even that doesn’t change the force of our love. It’s a mysterious thing, this love. It means that in those moments when we think the other is quite possibly the most horrible person in the world, we stay. It means that when we can’t stand the sight of each other because we’ve never been so mad in our lives before, we stay. It means that when the other least deserves kindness and forgiveness and love, we give it and we stay.
Love doesn’t look like roses and fairy tales and stimulating conversation all the time (though there are pieces that do). Sometimes love looks like puke you have to clean up in the middle of the night, because one of you can’t really handle this side of parenting. Sometimes love looks like a dark comedy, because one of you is sick now and the other is one on six, and those six are cutting with scissors and scribbling on a library book and running out the door he’s not supposed to open and asking for more milk and sliding down the stairs in a box and trying to get your attention so he can whine about how he didn’t have his technology time today and just getting dinner on the table feels like winning the Trojan War. Sometimes love looks like planning the week’s meals in the car—the only time you can hold a decent conversation, as long as the kids are listening to Disney songs or anything Taylor Swift.
Love is made of every day, every minute, every second, and therein lies the secret for why I would still choose you: Because you have loved me well every moment you’ve had. Your love has knocked me to my knees sometimes, and they get all bruised and a little scarred, maybe, but your love also picks me back up again. It lifts me to a greater height. It lets me fly.
I would choose you again because of your love, because you love without condition, because you love me just for me. You have touched every corner of the dark with your love, and there is no greater gift than this.
There is no greater gift than you. Happy anniversary, my love.
