When I was still a kid I didn't understand what it meant to be a boy. Being doesn't require understanding, after all. Being just is, and boys will be boys. This isn't about being a boy, however, it's about how we come to understand. While I was still a boy, not even twenty, I met a girl. I didn't, to be sure, understand what it meant to meet a girl. Meeting happens, boy meets girl, or so the story goes. Life is a mystery, the universe and whatnot, and the complexities therein don't lend themselves to comprehension. The basics of life, however, will explain themselves to you if you will only live. It's not so formulaic, but it's simple in an organic way. Not understanding what it meant to be a boy, I learned quickly in the hands of that girl what it means not to be a boy anymore. Maybe there are other ways, but for me it took a girl who became a woman and a little bit of time to make this boy a man, and not just in the bed, though there was that. She made me a man in my mind, deciding how to act, where to go, when to arrive. Being a man, life showed me in her arms, means wanting things that take longer, accepting a little trouble today in exchange for tomorrow. To be a man I gaze near-sighted into the distance and — fighting always against my hoarding desires — give my today away. I constantly realize suddenly, like waking up at the wheel, that I've lost my focus yet again. As a man, such as I am, I give but I always hope not to be diminished in so doing. Life shows me here what it might mean to be a woman. Women are content, I think, to ration themselves away to the world. Women burn themselves to keep us warm. Women do not hope to have anything left when it is over, they only hope that nothing went to waste.
I don't know. I don't know. Seventeen years I've been with you and I'm still just trying to understand. I feel like I'm speeding through life with you in my arms, hugging the curves so to speak, and it's been so much more than I ever expected out of life, so much more than I thought I deserved when I was a boy. These foggy mumblings of my dim mind could never tell you more than a tiny part of how I feel at this moment, and I cannot possibly feel everything I feel for you in a single moment. I love you so much more than I am able to understand clearly, so much more than I can say. Happy Anniversary.
Love.
