I try to write a post every year for my birthday. Even if I don’t have anything else to say for an entire year, even if the content is just how much I expected (or even wished) I wouldn’t make it to the next annual milestone. Sometimes I add in numerical allusions, statements on politics, or any of the other handful of things that PPC is known for.
This year’s a little different.
I’m 43 today. Three years into overtime, as I’ve come to think of it. If you asked me 5 years ago where I’d be on my 43rd birthday, I’d have only one response: in the ground. Because I really was that far gone. I won’t deny it. I still have the occasional dark thought along those lines even now.
Part of me wonders why I keep going, but that part of me has been in shock the past week. Leslie and I got married on Saturday. That’s it. That’s one of my life goals accomplished. Of the other two, well, owning a home is one that is probably out of my reach, given the current economic trajectory, and becoming a father is a lottery-level longshot. Then again, I thought becoming a husband was the same, and look at me now.
The ceremony was great. I won’t say it went off without a hitch, because it just didn’t. I fumbled her veil, our unity ceremony wasn’t fully prepped, and I kept stepping on her train as we walked down the aisle together. The reception was no better suited to the schedule we’d spent weeks agonizing over. We were in the middle of Hurricane Isaias, so we had to make a last-minute change of site at our venue: instead of an outdoor ceremony and pictures taken among the trees and flowers, we shifted into the barn for the words, and around the rustic reception hall for a very rushed photo hour. Half our guests left as soon as dinner was done. By the time we even got to dance—the first dance was to "Daylight" by Shinedown, about which I once remarked, "every single line of this song is what I want to say to the woman I love, the one who has given me a reason to go on throughout it all"—the only people left outside our immediate families were our ersatz wedding coordinator, her husband, the vendors, and my brother’s gamer friend who drove all the way to New York and ended up pitching in more than anyone.
None of that matters in the end. It could’ve just been the two of us, for all I care. The important part is that we expressed our love for each other in the most vocal, most traditional, and most touching way possible. Those moments were worth the three years of texting followed by the three of dating and arguing and loving and living. I have never felt more like a man—or, indeed, a human being at all—than Saturday afternoon. Leslie gave me that gift, and it counts for far more than any birthday present I’ve ever received.
Processing the changes that have occurred in my life in merely a single week is…an ongoing process, we’ll say. I’m writing this from the second bedroom of our apartment, where I’ve set up my home office, and it’s weird even thinking in terms of "our" apartment. I want to keep writing, or to go back to coding, or play a video game. But then I want to step into the living room and wrap my arms around her, to feel her body press against mine to remind me that, yes, this is real. It happened, and it’s forever.
My plans for this year all come back around to that. To her, to this family and life we’ve created. It’s been a struggle. There were times I wanted to give up—and times I did. We lost sight of the goal. We drifted. But we always came back. Call it whatever you like: fate, love, destiny, or just plain desperation to be less alone. Whatever the case, it deserves to be celebrated. I want to get back to writing novels, and all I can think when I ponder that is how I’ll never write relationships the same way. I’ll never need to, because they won’t be for wish-fulfillment anymore.
They’ll be from experience. And that is how I’ve grown wiser on this birthday.
