One year

Today is our first anniversary of marriage. We still like each other.

Circumstances look much like a year ago. We didn't have a home of our own, a Michigan hotel featured. By making space this summer for one or both of us to work abroad, we delayed the process of settling down even as the urge grew. Now we've stayed in 42 different beds in the past year. Now we're looking deliberately to that settling, but as they say in Dari, malum na-mesha, "it does not appear" yet what our next step should be.  

One year in the institution of marriage has opened me to new ways of hurting and being hurt, but also and better, ways of help and nurture I had not known.  "So help me God," was the most important line in our vows. 

I've begun to think of Tom and my joining lives as nuclear fusion. (Technically, nuclear fusion only happens in stars). Two adults smashed themselves together in rather short order, a man and a woman bringing all their histories, habits, and dreams into one entity. A lot of energy has been released in the process.  

I knew someone who called making this connection, to know and to be known, a miracle. It is.