Because I’m missing him terribly this week…

Bryan has been gone this week. We’ve had such a long stretch with him home, working from our basement studio, that I’ve grown really fond of having him around. This has been a sad and lonely week without him, so I will now wax eloquently of the many reasons I love this man.

Poetry. He writes me poetry, and reads his works to me at friendly gatherings with great energy and grandeur. My friend once described his readings as “So I Married an Axe Murder” poetry, which is to say it contains drama and rhythm, and is largely incomplete without the performance that goes along with each word.

He works hard, and is the most disciplined person I know. Every morning he wakes up at 5am to work out so he can still put in a ten hour day. He works from home, yet he showers every morning, gets dressed, takes exactly one hour for lunch, and kicks ass at his job. As I type this at three in the afternoon, I am still in my pajamas.

He protects his time with family. He wants to be with us, and makes this happen even when work is stressful and calls for long hours. He’s even disciplined with our money – our kids now have a college fund and our house has a new roof. If it were up to me, our kids would be screwed and our house would leak, but we’d have a beautiful new kitchen and a Toyota Highlander. I think endlessly about what I want, but he is always looking out for what we need.

Even though I’m the spontaneous one in this relationship, he’s the one who comes up with all the great ideas. I’ll say – Let’s do something fun today! – then proceed to spin my wheels about what that fun thing should be. After I agonize over indecision or brain block, he steps in to say, Let’s do [insert activity], and it’s always brilliant. It’s because of him we find ourselves picking pears at a friend’s orchard, or walking through Marymoor Park’s 40-acre dog park, or flying remote control airplanes in a field.

Six years ago I never would have thought I would feel this deeply in love. Somehow, even though the butterflies of first kisses have escaped us, the maturity of our love deepens and widens and multiplies in volume, filling out all the rough spaces and patching up all the holes and healing all the scars. Our love is a miracle, really – one rejected soul meeting one angry soul, each finding the comfort of the Refiner’s Fire in the other.

Come home soon, baby. We are missing you.