May Twelfth

kaweah river valley

One year ago today, holding hands at the far end of a covered deck over the roaring Kaweah River, my husband and I were married.

This has been my freedom. This has been my life.

He and I became fast friends when I was sixteen and he, eighteen. A year and change later, we admitted what was inescapable: we were stuck with each other. Love will do that to you.

He grew up south of Pittsburgh, in a family home in Castle Shannon, playing in the woods with his two younger brothers. I was raised between Tulare and Visalia, my mother's youngest child -- my siblings were old enough to have begun having children before I was so much as conceived -- bouncing between rental homes until a settlement allowed my mother to buy a run-down home as I was entering high school.

We met online well before it became acceptable to meet online. The internet allowed me a social outlet as a young teen with yet-to-be-understood disabilities, allowed me to grow an identity under the roof of a controlling single parent. And, to the contrary of the current conventional wisdom, interacting with the invisible people in my computer pushed me to develop social skills, which allowed me to fall into an awesome group of friends as I hit adolescence.

It came to a point where we talked every spare moment of every day. And it hasn't changed since.

To this day I'm not sure what drew him to me. Looking back, I see a confused child living with severe depression and toxic levels of self-loathing. But when I look forward and see a young woman fighting to break out from under the influence of fear and abuse, I see this quiet, steady young man standing next to her, coaxing her to come out into the light, step by small step. And I see that same young man realizing a greater confidence with the knowledge of his partner's trust and love.

The both of us have changed so, so much in this time. But as we have grown, we have grown together. We are not compatible in a simple sense of shared interests; we are compatible in our mutual adaptivity: teaching, learning, understanding, growing, and deepening our sense of self only helps our love, trust, affection, and understanding of one another do the same.

This has been my freedom -- this has been my life.

We have come so far together, and I hope we will go so much farther.

I love you, Matthew. I hope this year is only our first of many.