15 years of Valentines…

15 years ago I was walking down the hill from my house to the pub.  I can assure you this was a rare occasion, not the hill part but the pub part.  Ok, that is not true but I was young and frivolous so there you go.  Anyway.  I was walking down the hill and when I bumped into my friend.  He suggested that we hang out which sounded good, but we just had to pop into his friend’s house first.  So we did.

There I was, a mere slip of a thing, in my crazy turquoise coat (which I loved) and there is this boy with beautiful eyes.  I actually thought that at the time, I thought “Oh my god he has really gorgeous eyes.”  I was convinced he would never fancy me, he was convinced that I was dating his friend and that was why their night of blokey fun was being interrupted.  So he crashed our ‘date’ in a very unusual display of being outgoing and quickly realised that it was not his friend I was interested in.

So here we are, 15 years later.  One immigration, two children, three continents and many houses later.  Here we are, our lives so intertwined that we can’t imagine life without the other.  In fact I even struggle to remember the time when we weren’t together, weren’t a team, hand in hand along life’s merry journey.

We’ve gone from being kids to having kids.  We’ve changed, evolved, changed again and yet, there we were.  Here we are.

He’s stuck by me through the good times, the tough times, the really tough times and the amazing times.  He held my hand and cheered me on as I birthed our two children.  He’s carried me over mountains both real and internal and I still feel the same way I did when I walked into that room, when I looked into his eyes for the first time.

Is it really that simple?  No, I don’t think so.  When you love someone you choose to be together every day, you choose to love each other, support each other.  You fight, you make up, you plan, you dream.  Day to day it is so easy to be lost in the practicalities of life, in the little things and the big things.  Life sweeps us along and it can become too easy to forget.

But that moment stays with me, that and so many after it.  Snapshots of my life; a million different ways in which he is woven into me.  Every day a little more entwined, every day growing together.

I literally can’t, won’t and don’t want to imagine a day, my future, without him.  My beloved, my partner, my boy’s daddy, my best and dearest friend.

My love.