I had assumed my life would never again contain concepts like 'anniversaries' and to be wrong brings astonishment, even to this very Pi day. The improbability of it takes my breath away, if I pause to think about it.

Over years of texting and communicating through IM, you develop linguistic conventions that communicate emotion even through the impersonal medium of text. For me, an ever-present one has been the ellipsis; it denotes a moment without words. Often it's slackjawed astonishment. Sometimes it's laughter.

Yesterday it was tears.

A quick entry of two notable photos.

My smile blossomed at ten after four, when he walked in the door, unexpected, early.  I had commented to Adam online a bit earlier that there was something calm and perfect about the afternoon: the raging storm; the slanted lamplight across my laptop; the soft sound of snoring, geriatric cats.  Suddenly, it was better.

Jeff smiled as he put his bag down and said, "Stacy sent us all home."  He put down his string bag of water bottle, lunch remnants, and snacks; he took his place on the other couch and I paused from debugging.

It's easy to become constricted by my own, self-imposed, rules.  So far, every person I have written about here is someone who, at some point in the past or present, I could have called a lover.  It's easy to get hung up in that and write a laundry list of lovers, a titillating story of people and clothing undone, but that does a disservice to everyone on the list.

I've written about you before, in entries both public and private.  In the years before private entries I often avoided acknowledging you by name, allowing the unaware  to draw the conclusion that I must actually be speaking of the person I married.

It was not always the case.

For this installment, instead of starting with new words, I will acknowledge some old ones that were about you all along: