Your journal....

Going through a box of old things last weekend, I came across a journal of yours from a few years ago, just before we met. I hesitated a moment, unwilling to violate your privacy, even in your absence, then got the sense that there was something to my finding it, some touch of Fate. The intuition was strong enough that I sat down to read it, slowly translating it from your native tongue into my own, getting lost in the words you’d woven across the page so beautifully. The woman I saw there was much of the woman I know now, but younger, a bit more anxious and lost. The soul I know, the brave heart, the curious mind, she was still there, though, clearly.

As I read through each entry, I began to realize this was your gentle unfolding into who you are, the first tentative steps into the woman with whom I am so deeply in love. You touched gingerly here and there, at first, on the edges of the box into which you’d been placed for all your life, testing at its boundaries. Slowly, you began to build your own strength, bolstering your resolve, strengthening your spirit with compassion and reason, as you came to the realization that the life you’d lived, much of it prescribed by others and their expectations of you and your role in the world, wasn’t true to the life for which your spirit truly yearned. Even if you didn’t know for what it was you longed, you knew it was there. In the last entry, I swear I could feel you reached for me.

As I looked through the dates on your entries, I realized that they lined up with a period of deep sadness in my life, when I was restless and lonely, as though missing something that I couldn’t identify. I think, and perhaps this is just my romantic sensibilities, that I was feeling you, then, growing closer, but still just out of reach, in the way that we seem to now be able to sense the joy and pain of one another across the miles. My heart knew you, sought to offer yours comfort, to find you out in the wide world. 

Now, mere days before I will have you in my arms, I feel a similar restlessness and longing, but different. It feels this time like the anticipation before something beautiful, something that will change my life again, the way meeting you did the first time, when colors flooded back into my greying world, and the whisper of a song in my heart swelled into the symphony of love it now sings for us every days, gathered up in the harmony of yours. It is the wonderful nervousness of knowing that, in a step or two, we will walk together through the doorway into a new life for which we have both, it seems, been searching all of ours. Tillsammans. Together. I love you, my sweet girl, with the heart of that lost boy, and the greater one of this found man. I will be right here, now and always.