Loving you, is easy ‘cause you’re beautiful. And it really is. Some days when I wake up and look at you sleeping beside me, tears well up at the back of my eyes, especially if it’s been a rough week at work and we haven’t talked much because you’ve been busy.
I can only remember one major quarrel we’ve had in the past year, but there have been many small obstacles to surmount along the way: when I feel people look down on my job and on me for leaving private practice, when the pile of laundry looms in a busy week and I simply have to do it on a weekday because you won’t have any work clothes to wear otherwise, or the worst of all – when the ants just won’t go away and I’m too knackered to hunt them down and eradicate them one by one.
Through the mundane, the silly, the days I know I’m bordering being ridiculous about things; I know I can always count on a hug from you at the beginning and at the end of each day.
What makes you beautiful to me, is the assurance that I won’t ever in your eyes degenerate into a boring, frumpy housewife, and that you will continue to support the choices I make in life. Most of all, at this moment, it is the assurance that I did the right thing by leaving practice so I could manage the household and look after you. It is also the assurance that I am the prettiest girl to you, no matter if I spent the day feeling particularly unpretty in my black and white which has grown loose from years of weekly washing.
The last time I felt anything acutely was when I was 17, 18 years old – when I still cried buckets a whole year after I thought I had lost the only and greatest love I would ever experience in life. When memories came in snapshots with edges so sharp they threatened to tear your heart apart as they flashed through your mind at night.
A significant part of our six years together is now to me a blur of bus rides and you walking me home although I always insisted you didn’t need to, Friday nights at the Hong Kong Café at Marina Square, and frenetic wedding planning. It’s marked by certain key events of course, like Kit Chan singing Home at NDP 2010 at the Padang, and finally moving in with you and beginning life together almost one year ago today. The blur now includes the present week nights when I wait for you with dinner, then let you watch TV with the lights on and glaring into the bedroom as I fall asleep to the dulcet tones of Max and Gloria, because I know it’s important to you to watch television after a long day at work. When I wake up in the morning and fruit flies are hovering around the empty can of Sapporo on the living room table and I diligently rinse it and bring it down to the recycling bin downstairs, on my way to work.
I don’t think we give enough credit to the sheer amount of time, the minutes, days, weeks and years it takes to build a relationship. Waking hours of happiness, pure joy and delight, nights of sadness and wondering, cold wars and silence. And to realise one day that you trust someone as much as it is humanly possible to trust another fallible human being, that you understand what it means to love him fully and completely with all the love your unworthy heart can muster.
It didn’t start with the acute feelings of an 18 year old, but with the certainty of a 20 year old whose years of guilt, shame and failed relationships melted away when she met you. It was the breeze on a hot, still night, in the face of a 23 year old. And it is the knowledge of the 26 year old who is your wife and lifetime companion, that you are, and this is, the greatest love of her life.
Happy one year anniversary in one week my love. I thank God for the privilege of being your wife.
I can only remember one major quarrel we’ve had in the past year, but there have been many small obstacles to surmount along the way: when I feel people look down on my job and on me for leaving private practice, when the pile of laundry looms in a busy week and I simply have to do it on a weekday because you won’t have any work clothes to wear otherwise, or the worst of all – when the ants just won’t go away and I’m too knackered to hunt them down and eradicate them one by one.
Through the mundane, the silly, the days I know I’m bordering being ridiculous about things; I know I can always count on a hug from you at the beginning and at the end of each day.
What makes you beautiful to me, is the assurance that I won’t ever in your eyes degenerate into a boring, frumpy housewife, and that you will continue to support the choices I make in life. Most of all, at this moment, it is the assurance that I did the right thing by leaving practice so I could manage the household and look after you. It is also the assurance that I am the prettiest girl to you, no matter if I spent the day feeling particularly unpretty in my black and white which has grown loose from years of weekly washing.
The last time I felt anything acutely was when I was 17, 18 years old – when I still cried buckets a whole year after I thought I had lost the only and greatest love I would ever experience in life. When memories came in snapshots with edges so sharp they threatened to tear your heart apart as they flashed through your mind at night.
A significant part of our six years together is now to me a blur of bus rides and you walking me home although I always insisted you didn’t need to, Friday nights at the Hong Kong Café at Marina Square, and frenetic wedding planning. It’s marked by certain key events of course, like Kit Chan singing Home at NDP 2010 at the Padang, and finally moving in with you and beginning life together almost one year ago today. The blur now includes the present week nights when I wait for you with dinner, then let you watch TV with the lights on and glaring into the bedroom as I fall asleep to the dulcet tones of Max and Gloria, because I know it’s important to you to watch television after a long day at work. When I wake up in the morning and fruit flies are hovering around the empty can of Sapporo on the living room table and I diligently rinse it and bring it down to the recycling bin downstairs, on my way to work.
I don’t think we give enough credit to the sheer amount of time, the minutes, days, weeks and years it takes to build a relationship. Waking hours of happiness, pure joy and delight, nights of sadness and wondering, cold wars and silence. And to realise one day that you trust someone as much as it is humanly possible to trust another fallible human being, that you understand what it means to love him fully and completely with all the love your unworthy heart can muster.
It didn’t start with the acute feelings of an 18 year old, but with the certainty of a 20 year old whose years of guilt, shame and failed relationships melted away when she met you. It was the breeze on a hot, still night, in the face of a 23 year old. And it is the knowledge of the 26 year old who is your wife and lifetime companion, that you are, and this is, the greatest love of her life.
Happy one year anniversary in one week my love. I thank God for the privilege of being your wife.
