11/26/17

i'm thankful for my marriage to d, which is the best and most important thing in my life, even though sometimes like most people we hit bumps in the road and we hit some this weekend, which was hard and sad. i'm thankful for the strange ontology of being married, how it made our relationship concrete enough to change even the simplest ways of conceptualizing existence; my life became our lives, her plans our plans, my choices our choices, her sadness our sadness. i'm thankful, since sometimes i let myself get too involved in things in the world that bring only me joy or satisfaction (rather than things that bring both of us joy, together), a habit that i have had since i was a child who would sit alone in his closet in the dark imagining, to try to better recognize when that's happening, to take opportunities to step back and remind myself to take care with that, that i am not just me but part of a we. i'm thankful that she has her own things that bring just her joy and satisfaction too, since inside of the plural there are singular parts of us that still exist (maybe the same parts that, when we were single, drew us to each other in the first place), and i'm thankful that we try to give each other the space to indulge in those things and use them to nourish those parts of ourselves, but i'm also thankful to remind myself that one of the reasons we got married was because we didn't want space anymore, because we wanted to be together forever, every day and always. i'm thankful to remember when i proposed, early one saturday morning, kneeling beside the bed we still sleep in every night, and she said yes and we got up and went out to buy flowers.