I've just seen a face

I hope that you are ready for a mushy love post. Consider yourself warned.

Sunday was our first wedding anniversary. We spent most of the day at the same place where we were married, my mom's house. You know that already from yesterday's boring post. When I woke up Sunday morning, I told Brandon happy anniversary, and remarked that a year ago I had awoken at around 5:00 AM, completely filled with a superhuman energy that propelled me out into the yard, where I connected a complex series of extension cords that lit the orchard with pretty white lights; then I made and remade some flower arrangements, and spent most of the rest of the day paralyzed in the house because of a carefully arranged hairstyle that, despite a heavy shellac of hairspray, kept me immobilized with the fear that it could be destroyed.

I decided to post these pictures on this mushy entry, rather than any wedding pictures. These are pictures that were taken the day after our first date... so this is July 16, 2006. B had asked me out on a date a few weeks before but we weren't able to get together sooner because of his crazy work schedule. I was living at home with my parents and went to Nashville that weekend, stayed with Wendy and Mark in preparation for hanging out with Brandon. We hung out for the first time in Murfreesboro, in the hovel that B was living in, a terribly hot apartment on the second story of an old house on College St. He told me that he didn't have an air conditioner, little did I know that in fact, the AC unit was in the closet because he was determined not to use it that summer. This was a harbinger of B's extreme attitudes regarding heating and cooling that make my life hot in the summer, cold in the winter to this day.

We (maybe it's just me) look rough as fuck in these pictures because we were up all night the night before, and by the time we were ready to go to sleep, it was about 170 degrees in the hovel. We laid on the floor, too hot to touch one another, and watched Baraka, which was really awesome right up to the point where they chopped all the beaks off the baby chickens. Have you ever seen this film? My favorite part is the monkey in the hot springs, in the snowy mountains. You can see that at around 2:00, here, and I promise, you won't see any debeaked chicks.

God, look at my thigh. I swear to God my thigh was only that skinny for 18 hours, a gift from the Lord in order that the match of Amanda + Brandon could be made. That was the skinniest time of my life, probably due to all the depression and obsession and many nights of "drinking my dinner." I know that liquor is high in calories but when it's all you're consuming, eventually it makes you thin. I think.

I never really believed in soulmates before I met B. I mean, how can you possibly pronounce that in all the zillions of people in all the world, there is one person out there who is your perfect match? I still think this is bullshit. However... I definitely believe that there was a certain set of situations that occurred at the right time for both of us that set our relationship in motion. And, as cheesy as it sounds, I have to call it fate.

The other day I was writing an email to someone that I don't see or communicate with that often, and he had made a compliment to me about our relationship. In response, I told him that it wasn't always easy, but it is always worth it. I know that being together has changed the both of us in so many ways, the way we see ourselves, the way we see the world, and the way we see ourselves living the rest of our lives. We're at this stage of life in which the decisions we make are taking have more and more weight -- having a kid, deciding where we want to settle, and how we want to do it -- and it's really daunting sometimes, to have these decisions to make. But I try not to worry about it because you know, as long as we're together, we can make it all work out. That much has to be true.

"I give you my love, more precious than money
I give you myself before preaching or law;
Will you give me yourself?
Will you come travel with me?
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?"

That's from Walt Whitman's Song of the Open Road, and we used it as our vows.