You are cleaning right now, sorting clothes into 'keep' and 'donate' piles, with the end hope of having a usable closet again. I am in the computer room, new music playing, cooling down from my second workout of the day and trying to give you the room you need to finish your task in the space of a day.

A day, this day, your thirtieth birthday.

On the day I married you, I stood there, twenty-one, wondering what in the world we'd manage to do with our lives if we walked in the same direction.

It's been so long since the discovery of the synchronicity of our birthdays that the magic of it is a little lost on us now: yours the sixteenth, your sister Lori's the eighteenth, mine the twentieth. Instead, over the years, October has just become 'our month'; a birthday week shared by us and, later, unwittingly, by two cats who were born five years ago, sometime between your birthday and mine.

Somewhere along the way, in the time we've known each other, we've become the singular two-headed, four-legged entity I joked about as our wedding day approached.

I wondered then how I would cope with that change.

I wonder now how I would've coped without it.

Happy birthday, love.