Another Season, Another Reason...

One year ago today, I somehow convinced the sweetest, most wonderful person I've ever known that her life would be improved by forming some sort of commitment with me. At the time, I had known her for a few years, I'd been infatuated with her for over a year, and we had only started sharing important details about our offline lives maybe six months prior. I don't really know exactly what I expected out of the relationship - on the surface, it was just an online "collar," which only meant that we weren't going to cyber with anyone else and would be recognized as a couple in the chatrooms we visited.

Of course, those chatrooms were all but nonexistent by that time, so really what was the point of putting her name next to mine in little curly brackets on my MSN profile? Deep down I knew that I was having much stronger feelings for her. Feelings that I was trying to keep in check for the most part, because frankly they were things I wasn't sure I wanted to face. Now of course I recognize that there were two intertwined strands: 1. I was falling for her hard, and 2. my dominance was knocking at the door.

I'm not going to make this another retrospective nostalgic post by glossing our history together yet again. The blog archive speaks for itself fairly well (I started this blog a few days after we became a couple). Suffice it to say that from a humble starting place, transcendent and universe-altering things developed. We tended our austere and encapsulated zen garden, and awoke one day to find a cherry tree fully grown and in blossom at its center. Then a stand of trees. Then a grove far overflowing the bounds of the garden. Then the landscape was flooded with the trees as far as the eye could see, all continually blossoming. Perpetual, ubiquitous spring.

Since it has been a full year, the changing of the seasons has been on my mind a lot of late. In some climates and some years, there are sharp demarcations between one season and the next, but for the most part I'm used to a gradual ebb and flow, like the changing of the tides. Some of the changes my magnificent woman and I have been through have been deliriously sudden, but most have been gradual and accumulative. And every single shift has felt so natural and perfect and obvious and right.

We are an online couple, in a long-distance relationship. We will meet face-to-face one day, hopefully sooner rather than later. But despite the distance (I know in my heart it's "despite," not "because of," so you'll just have to trust me), this is the most fulfilling, beautiful, magical time in my life. I could drain all the adjectives out of the dictionary and never express a fraction of what I feel for my k.

My k. My sweet effervescent disarming melodious k. I love you darlin, from the surface of my skin to the marrow of my bones. Every cell in my body sings your name. The very fact that brilliant scintillating colorful you would surrender all that you are to me - and that I not only welcome it but demand it - that can make me shudder so profoundly that I wonder if the world has tilted on its axis.

Happy anniversary, to the girl of my dreams and the love of my life.