Happy Valentine’s Day! To all of you: beloved friends, community acquaintances, readers, family, old friends, and new.
I appreciate you and I’m grateful we have this weird, modern medium to use to keep us connected. Valentine’s day is weird and can be isolating and too full of Hallmark for comfort, but I still think excuses to celebrate love, tell people we love them, and spend quality time together (well, that’s my love language anyway), are all generally positive and I gratefully accept an excuse to focus on it, and let you know that I am glad to know you all.
and:
To this incredible person, my partner, my spouse, my boy of almost 9 years, rife: I love you.
I’m grateful for our intense, beautiful, swoon-worthy courtship, grateful for our years of struggle to figure out how we fit together and what we are really going to do together and how we, two flawed humans, are going to make a life together, and grateful that we are looking forward into the future again with a vision for our partnership that stretches long beyond the horizon that I can see. I adore you. I never get tired of your company — ?? Which still confuses me, because I get tired of almost everybody else, massive introvert that I am. But I love you next to me on the couch, in the woods, crafting and listening to podcasts, or watching another episode of the Great British Baking Show when we should be sleeping. I love the way you take care of your chillest dog and my grouchy old lady cat, and how determined you are to make the world a better place by tending the earth, and how you are so patient and kind, and how you make art out of everything, even the flaws and things I used to label as decay or destruction. that you are in my life inspires me to be better, motivates me to step up and dream bigger, and makes me want to impress you.
I love you — today, & all the days we get to will have together, and the 3,072 days we’ve been together already.
