Dear Self,
I write this on the evening of your first wedding anniversary, May 30, 2011. I don't know what you're doing, but I do know who you are, and I like to imagine that your dreams have shifted and grown in ways so unpredictable to me that I'd be surprised by many things about you and pleased that all the good parts have stayed the same. But promise me this: that you have done your best to love him more, and better, every day. That you remember all the reasons that drew you together in the first place.
Yes, you love hiking together, and riding bikes, and badly describing distant birds. And you probably have even more connecting the two of you now: hopefully you will have made some children together, those mysterious beings of the future; though now they seem the strange opposite of ghosts. And yes, there is probably a house, and careers, and no doubt there has been an ongoing series of poorly behaved cats.
But Self, remember that you love the stories he tells you. Remember that you met along a river in the most beautiful place in the world. Remember the nighthawks that hunted overhead when you revisited that place on your honeymoon. How the two of you just watched as they fell through the clean desert air again and again, so close you could feel the rush of their wings. How the faint smell of water blew in on the juniper wind. How the two of you sat for hours, it seemed, without really speaking, because you knew it was special, even as you knew it wasn't: the show happened every night whether the two of you were present or not. It was a chance brush with the world, a convergence of beings, much like your meeting. You looked up at those nighthawks from a shared point on earth. May you have never stopped looking.
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