Cycles...

A little tipsy and a little tired, but the moment must be marked somehow. We have reached the four year mark (on the eighth day of the eighth month of the eighth year by the way) and it has been an interesting few years to say the least. We gave ourselves a year and then decided that extended separations in the form of military service might just be a good idea. Which, of course, they certainly were not. The whole first year of training was basically a giant crisis followed by another year of crisis as I dealt with the fact that there was still no way out of the hell I had signed up for. There have been times when the easiest way was most certainly to part ways and make the best of differences created and differences found. But, the best by far would have been lost. The times when I realize that no one in the world travels the same channel quite so well as him. Or the times daily that we finish each other's sentences. The fact that we both consider the grotesque and the risque completely useful devices in conversation, and that our humors are pulled from the same muse. Crazy though she is. Until lately, we have even had our downswings and upswings in just such a way that one of us can pull the other one up from whatever mire they have stumbled upon. Recently has been harder than perhaps even the year virtually apart what with the feeling of forever with the army and the addition of prescribed nonsense for Tom. But we have made it. We have made it through the horrors of mothers that should have been...but weren't. We have made it through the dismay of family and friends. In fact, we have more than made it. We have discovered what it means to be of one flesh and one mind. We have become a fused person, and we are infinitely weaker apart. I have seen over and over what unconditional love means and what it costs to offer it and to receive. I have cried and laughed and felt like dying and received the same enough to know that neither one of us will ever ever leave by choice. There is the pattern of eternity budding in our graft now and only death will show what waits for us beyond the life that we will so gladly spend on each other.