one hundred ninety-five

What's making this work, what's really holding it together, are the snapshots, the candids, the annual pictures we know are only a few months away. Now that we can see it, the date written on a calendar of this current year, we can see what follows. So when I wake up and eat breakfast alone at my desk and think of him at the bookstore, saving those dollars for Euros to get us through those first days away, I know that it's all worth it, this time apart.

We have long since grown tired of people saying that absence makes the heart grow fonder. We are fonder, and each day when we say I love you we are fonder still. It is not the absence, but the knowledge that being able to stand this absence implies that eventually, it will not exist. So I'm focusing on the death of absence, on those first days of true marriage.

But this then becomes abstract, because our year-long honeymoon cannot be marked as our beginnings of real marriage. The surreality of being away and alone but not at all alone because for the first time we're truly together, without an end point, makes me push past this. This is my daydream, the snapshot I hold in my head, but what seems most real to me is that first apartment in the days after France, when we are in a university town, sharing a one-room apartment that we have painted with walls we have covered in our mismatch art and photos and cards and precariously hung shelves.

What I think about:

Photos taken from Design to Inspire & Design*Sponge