The View From Here

Soon, I will be celebrating my anniversary.

I think.

My husband has something secret planned that he's been working on for a while now. I have no idea what he's got up his sleeve, but the fact that there is anything up there means something.

This has not happened before, this planning and intention. It's new and unfamiliar and I'm still not quite sure what to do with it.

Things are just different now.

This year, we will have been married for fifteen years, though whoever I was married to for most of that time doesn't resemble much the man I am married to now. Things aren't just different, he is different.


I want to say that I'm the same I ever was, but I know that to be false. I know that for as much as parts of me have remained unchanged in that time, I have hardened. I have erected shields and barriers and I see the world through rose colored glasses that I didn't want to purchase nor do I want to wear.

I'm trying to take them off.

While it doesn't even seem possible at times that we've been married so long, I know that it must be true simply for the fact that so much has happened to us, to those around us, between us.

Never in a million years could anyone have predicted some of those things, let alone all of them in the combinations they presented themselves in the times and spaces they showed up.

We're here now, though. That's saying something.

I wasn't sure we would be.

We're older, maybe we're wiser. We're definitely more scarred now.

The view from here is not the same I imagined it would be, for certain. Or maybe it is, but I'm just seeing it with eyes that I didn't anticipate having. I'm not sure which, honestly.

That's probably because I'm not sure about much these days.

One thing I am sure of, though is this:

I love him.

Some days that doesn't matter at all anymore, and others it's the only thing that does. It's what has kept us here, what has kept us together, what has forced us to delve into the past, what keeps us pressing forward into an unknown future.

Together.

Happy Anniversary, Tom. I love you.