Beginnings

Do you remember what we were at the very beginning? I hate to give beginnings more credit than they are due, but ours was so very filled with excitement and heat and lust and desire that it seems only fitting that nearly a decade in, I should feel not so dissimilarly infatuated with the very idea of choosing to spend our lives with one another.

Do you recall the frivolity and the passion and the driving one another mad? The trips to see one another after months apart, falling asleep glued to your body and fearful that if I let you go I would awaken a thousand miles away. The way the minutes dragged between visits and I found myself counting down the seconds until I could check for another email from you. I spent hours and hours and hours composing thoughts for you – ours was a love established, first and foremost, on words and late night phone calls and intense moments of physicality followed by giant gaps during which we fed our connection with thoughts and truths and the innermost portions of ourselves.

I drank a bottle of the cheapest red talking to you and the conversation lasted for so many hours that it was two am before I realized I had to teach the next day and I had nearly finished the bottle and yet I could not stand the idea of hanging up the phone. I obsessed over the words of your letters; over the affection and intent implicit in the time you spent constructing them. I fawned over the care packages you sent; the photo shoot you set up for our gloves after I left mine at your house following a weekend skiing. I fell in love with you and the life I thought we could have and your dog and making salads together and taking the dogs on runs and the way you always brought me a cup of coffee in the morning.

The painful thing about loving you like this is that one of us shall have to leave this place first. Either I will leave you or you will leave me and I fear I will find myself so desperately and utterly empty either way. I have loved you so very deeply and for so very long that the idea of not sharing the same space feels like a terror I can hardly fathom.

You have crafted so much of my reality and so much of my world for so long that your absence would steal all of the light from the world. It is such a wonderful gift and such a terrible, terrible burden to love someone as I love you; to love anyone in such a way that they are utterly and fully capable of shattering one into pieces.

Thank you for the back rubs and the ice cream and for listening through thousands of tears and for dissuading my fear and uncertainty and for giving me the courage to be precisely who I am at every moment. Thank you for being the kind of father every child deserves to have but so few do. Thank you for your patience and your persistence and your fortitude when I am ready to quit. Thank you for the nights in Santa Fe and a thousand inside jokes and for pretending calm when I am driving and you are not in control. Thank you for our children and a hundred unrealized dreams and for willingly embarking on new adventures that throw everything into chaos. Thanks for waking me from nightmares and still reaching for my hand and for Sundance and hundreds of bottles of wine late into the night.

Thank you for choosing me and for every single minute we have left ahead of us. I love you.