Today is a day so special I woke up early and went and got the champagne, and woke Jacob up with a glass and a toast, but he was awake anyway. He always wakes up when I stir in the mornings.
A toast to us. To him.
Today is the very last day of year one. Our first year together as a couple. As a couple of I-don't-know-whats, but a couple nonetheless. The final, three hundred and sixty fifth day of a long, arduous, perilous trip around the moon with detours to heaven a good six hundred times and back again. A journey of epic proportions in which I think my heart was dropped and picked up and broken and stitched and glued back together so many times I am a human mosaic from the inside out.
A year in which I tried to destroy my best friend and yet he is still here and as strong as ever and hopeful and full of his goofy faith-branded goodness that keeps him going even as I'm pulling so hard on the brakes I have permanent burns on my fingers and heels from digging in.
A year in which I was threatened, pushed and goaded past every insurmountable obstacle that sprang up one after the other and when I screamed for a break he simply set his mouth and pushed me more. If you think I am so hard on him just know that I rarely talk about how hard he is on me.
A year that saw a tiny bloom on a plant long left for dead flourish and expand until it outshone everything else in the garden. Our love, long denied, allowed to fly free like a bird and oh my fuck, have we ever soared. Sometimes we crash and burn and we pick ourselves up or we pick each other up and keep going.
I am the most perfect and the most imperfect human bean alive.
And I am loved.
And I love. Still. In spite of life I fell so hard in love I expected to shatter when I hit bottom. I'm still falling though and it won't stop.
So hard it floors me. Daily. And I've come to write about fights and awkward times and difficult moments and yet at the end of almost every single one of those three hundred and sixty five nights, give or take a couple of hospital stays, a business trip or two and some really stupid arguments I have fallen asleep in Jacob's arms, safe and warm and lucky and well aware that he is the one I want to spend the rest of my life with and I'm glad I get to live with him. And so crushed that I have ever hurt him, made him sad, made him angry or made him regret his choices. I write the trouble that I am for him as penance sometimes.
He maintains he wouldn't have it any other way, that despite the hardships this year has held, despite the ups and downs and the heartache and the pain when he looks at me he is filled with joy, with hope and with gratitude, but most of all with love.
Big love, he says, for his little Bridget. And through most of the past decade, everything aside, he says he is happy, because he got exactly what he wished for, so hard for so long.
Me.
But he is not the lucky one. I am.
We're spending this final day of our first year together, like we spend all our days now, hand in hand. In arms. In love.
I know. God, Bridget, the cheese! Enough.
Oh you think there's excitement today, just you wait until tomorrow.
Section chief: Are you damaged?
Condor: Damaged. No.
