1,095 down

Friday night Garrett and I celebrated our 3rd anniversary. We’ve now been together, “Nathan and Garrett”, “Garrett and Nathan”, “Us”, for 1,095 days. I guess I wanted to take a moment to just acknowledge what the past three years has been like for me.

From the start my relationship with Garrett has been different from past relationships. I didn’t go into it thinking of a long term committment: he was getting ready to move to Mississippi for a year-long internship, and I had just started a new job. I thought I had the world on a string: I had a job I liked, a red sports car, and a fabulous apartment in downtown Fort Wayne. I thought it would be a summer fling, something to occupy my attention until school started again. What I didn’t know it in the beginning is that Garrett could be the missing piece in that equation. Actually, Garrett was the missing piece in my life: the stuff I thought made me “successful” was, well, just stuff.

I should have known it would be different with Garrett: the first time he spent the night, I told him “you know, I’ve always wanted to be a writer.” I had never confessed that to anyone before. I had never expressed doubts that my “calling”, my passion, was programming and computing. I wish I could say that my ability to confess that to Garrett signaled a new dawn of honesty and intimacy for me, but that came much later.

More than anything else, the thing that strikes me about Garrett is his unwavering belief in me and us. Over the past year, as I’ve struggled with the questions of “what should I do with my life?” and “why am I here, in this place?” he’s been a continual support. He’s encouraged me to seek help where I needed it, expressed confidence in my ability when I doubted it, and somehow always known what I need to hear. When I get bogged down with a need to find the “right” answer to a question, Garrett’s there to remind me that there may not be a “right” answer.

Has our relationship been without trial or confrontation? Of course not. But I’m so grateful that we’ve both valued what we have enough to sit down, talk it out, work it out. And today, I feel like Garrett is my true soul-mate, my partner in crime, my co-conspirator in life. We’re not there yet, but the intimacy we’re building, the language of shared experience, is worth anything I’ve had to sacrifice. And what I’ve found out about myself, well, that’s been worth the pain, soul-searching and introspection. Thank you, Garrett; I love you.