THESE DAYS, BEFORE VOWS...

And these are the days that I have waited my whole life for. Days when I can see a future that is much better than the days when life hurt too hard to breathe. These days we can be distracted by the lie that our lives would be better if we just didn't disagree about the small things, if there had never been a disagreement in the first place if the introduction to a possible love had never happened.

It would not be easier.

It would not be easier without him here.

I think now that is the point of love, that when raw life tries to intercept the healing, we realize we are so much better together than apart. We learn to love more when our presence in the lives of those we cannot live without makes them want to be whole and healed by the love flowing through unseen veins.

He and I are about to do the unthinkable. And I have never felt the reality of being so crazy obedient as I am today...we have seemingly thrown convention right out the window. We are about to intertwine lives separate for now one day soon, although I have watched the cleaving apart of marriages around me. Are we nuts?

Probably.

But would I be crazier or lonelier or sadder or angrier without him?

Absolutely. Nonplussed.

If I wasn't able to answer this so truly, so definitively, then I am nowhere near ready. Other tangible issues, other carnal realities, may demand years of waiting. But this love demands that we embrace it. NOW. Can loving another ever be a mistake taken? I know some that are asking this when the cleaving apart happens.

But because free will to do foolish things are evident, the foolish decisions do not undo the essence of love. They do not undo what the heart speaks and what those blood-words, those covenant words do to us. They make us become better, even if circumstances get worse. If one loves and the other does not, there is no pretense that love changed somebody - most likely the one that gave it their all.

I am not better without this one, this man being right here - willing to do the most foolish thing in the world: throwing caution to the wind and becoming physical covenant on earth, giving all, no apologies. My world demands this covenant, so those who are watching my life from afar can be challenged to love again and again and again.

So we will stand there, face to face, with all our imperfections and say yes to a perfect love that will undo everything we thought - everything that almost destroyed the hungry hearts beating beneath breast-bone. We take that healed heart and hand it over to the other across sand, the expanse of time, the eraseable past that we were once ashamed of.

And I know now, before it ever happens, that I cannot live without doing this.

These days this is what I think of.