the first day

I won’t say that two years ago, Stuart walked through the front door and I knew I’d marry him. I’ll err on the side of caution and say, I knew it three days later. So today is the anniversary of the day we met, three days before I knew without question that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him.
I will say that the heart doesn’t lie. When we sat down to eat Chinese food, 30 minutes after he arrived at Shiv’s apartment, we started talking about books and I got this feeling in my ribcage, possibly my heart. The best way to describe it is this: when a horse has been locked in a stable for a long time but it’s a beautiful day and you open the stable door to let him into the paddock, he will immediately sense the wildness of the land outside the paddock. He will sense the summer day, the grass, the running he has to do. And he will pace, back and forth, twitching his tail, trying to get you to notice that he needs to be let out of the paddock; he needs to run. That was my heart, when Stuart and I were talking. I didn’t even know what the summer’s day was, or that it was there, but there was something fundamental inside me, pacing back and forth, demanding to be let free.
Another way of describing it would be to say that I’d been sliding along in a dark room, along the smooth wall, for years. I’d been sliding around a doorless room, almost wondering if perhaps there was no door, there was only wall. But I didn’t stop sliding. The feeling inside me during that first real conversation that I had with Stuart, where our eyes kept lighting up with understanding and camaraderie, was the feeling of having crept around uselessly in a doorless, unlit room only to finally stumble upon a crack in the wall, and to follow that crack around the pitch-black wall with the tips of your fingers barely daring to believe you’ll find a doorknob. And the doorknob will be there even if it’s never been there before, and that frantic excitement mingled with disbelief mingled with incontrovertible proof, that’s how it felt to meet Stuart. Like a door had opened.
So you can see what it was like two years ago. I didn’t have these words, I didn’t have the assurance that would come with our first kiss, the first time we said the word love, the first time he told me he couldn’t and wouldn’t be apart from me anymore than he absolutely had to be, that beside me was where he was meant to be even if it meant crossing an ocean. I didn’t have those comparably solid emotions, words of substance to react to. All I had on that first day was this kicking, breathing, daring-to-believe-it feeling that the summer day was here, the doorknob was there, and something huge had arrived. Something life-changing had happened.
And I couldn’t wait to get started.