Since we met in Wayland Hall back in 2007, in our freshman year of college, I've had a feeling of something great to come. Something bigger than I had felt before, something that would send ripples through the rest of my life. I didn't know what it was at the time, and it has taken me until now, through four wrong guesses over the years, to realize what it was.
For a while I thought we would just be a couple--just being a couple was exciting when we were 18. But even then, fresh into my first year of college, I sensed that this was something more than that. This was something adult, something powerful, like a force of nature. Maybe a little scary. I wrote about it on an 8-year-old scrap of paper I still have. But we weren't ready then, and I discovered that this was the first time I was wrong about what I felt.
But then, two years later, I discovered, to my delight, that I had been wrong once more--the big, expected event that I felt wasn't puppy love or teen heartbreak, it was a miracle--we had grown a little, and we could handle what we could become. And so followed the best five years of my life to date.
Then a few weeks ago I was trying to figure out what to say here, and I realized I was wrong again, for a third time. I've felt something great to come for 8 years now, one third of my life, and it's taken me until now to realize what it was. The big event I sensed over the horizon wasn't our triumphant reunion five years ago, it was our union, it was this, the day of our marriage.
But now, standing here, I realize I was wrong for a fourth time. I'm wrong a lot, I admit it. What I've been breathlessly awaiting since we first met--it wasn't puppy love, or the last eight years of happiness, or even the day of our marriage. It's tomorrow--and the day after that--it's the rest of our lives together. Now I see why I've always felt there was something great to come! I have you, and that has made me happier than I ever thought I could be.
Sara, I can't wait for it all.
I love you. Eli
*************************** It seems like luck on the magnitude of a 3-million leaf clover that not only did I find someone who makes me feel strong and safe and beautiful and whole, but that that person loves me back in this beautiful (and sometimes blinding) double-mirror effect. For most of my life, I've felt this deep-down kind of ache for (what it turns out was) you. You've replaced that feeling with the good kind of ache, the kind that doesn't come from feeling like there's a hole in me but from feeling too whole, from feeling like a lifetime and a half wouldn't be enough to make the amount that I love you fit completely inside me.
I love you, Eli Moss, with my whole heart and then some. And while we've made a lot of things together, all of them charmingly imperfect, gratifyingly difficult, and not too injurious, I know that the life we make together will be the best by far.