us.

I look over at him and touch his muscled arm. He is perfection in his thin grey cotton sweater and faded jeans.

Are you tired? I ask him. I don't even know why I'm asking this, but his eyes meet mine, and I just feel it.

No. He answers. And then he yawns and smiles at me. Maybe.

He's leaving tomorrow again for a few nights. I hate sleeping alone. Twenty-some years of side-by-side with this one man, and it feels unnatural without him there. I wake up after turning and turning and reaching for him. When he's here, he drives me nuts snoring and wiggling and waking up to pee. But when he's not here, all I think about is his warmth and his comfort, even if we aren't touching. I miss it all, I miss him.

I look over at him and flood with feeling. And I wonder when it was that I became so attached.

***

I look back and try to recall when it was that we made the switch. The Big Change. How we got to this place of Bliss we live in now. It wasn't always like this. Yes, we have always loved each other fiercely. We have always had a very passionate relationship. And he did come to me like a dream. Just when I had stated to myself that I didn't need a man in my life *bam* he was there and not only was he there, but it was magic and he was this crazy impossible compilation of everyone I had ever loved up to that point. Only the most perfect parts. Only the parts that I had mentally, emotionally, somewhere within my soul taken note of. And the way he was, everything about him, shocked and amazed me. But the most amazing part of it all was that he felt exactly the same way. It was like our love never really had a beginning, it just was. Huge and blooming and so much more than the two of us. Our love never had a beginning because I honestly feel that our love has never had an ending.

But this lifetime together, this love, has always had challenges since those first halcyon days in college. We are raw and open and messy and fiery. We pull within, and when we close up we fight, we ebb and flow with each others moods. It's just lately that we have learned to flow together. To be completely open the way we were when we first met. To trust and allow and be and let be. It is bliss. I am so in love with life, and with him. I am so lucky.