I’m really not sure how to write this.

It’s something I haven’t really thought about — not clearly anyway — because the task of putting words together in all coherency seems a little too daunting. It’s difficult, even for someone as accustomed to writing as myself, when stringing phrases or sentences is far easier than speaking them aloud.

It’s still hard.

But I can try.

I can take a quiet moment to breathe. And think about what’s happened in the last month. Ponder with furrowed brow and a dissatisfied look in my eyes at how to collapse all the tiny little moments together and weave them into text. The shared smiles. The rushing street lamps from the window. Planned surprises. Failed surprises. Chasing the sun. Staying up all night gift-wrapping and realising I hadn’t improved from the last time I tried wrapping someone else’s gift. Hours of conversation under starlight.

Maybe what I need to do is to start over. To say how everything began, for me, at least in bits and bytes and binary, in a quiet ripple from thought to ether and manifesting in font size ten on fifteen inch liquid crystal.

Then it was copping out by writing in a veil of fiction: stories of forlorn love letters to a wife thousands miles away, of dreams, or of a 100% perfect girl on an April morning, or how we can miss someone so much that all we can do is run away, or about wanting to give up.

But it would’ve been too easy to walk away. And while the journey up to one month ago was one where I struggled, pleaded, ranted to and with God, I’m all the glad for it. I wouldn’t be where or who I am at this moment if not for that near one year of walking along the precipice of fleshly uncertainty. Relinquishing the flesh. Learning to trust Him all over again.

Sometimes, like I tell her, I want to be a massive dork and tell the whole world about us as she rolls her eyes and suppresses her gag reflex (it is a constant source of amusement to us both at the seeming reversal of gender roles). But I never did go ahead with all that gut-spilling saccharrine nonsense (which was hard). Because, as I came to realise, that some moments should belong only to us.

If you ask me, it hasn’t really sunk in yet. Everything takes on this surreal dream-like quality, like vignettes and faded washed-out colours and white borders. It’s very far from my own romanticised, idealistic notions of what it means to be in a relationship, but this relationship’s better than all of my schoolboy ruminations put together.

I’ll share a little something I wrote to God a couple of weeks ago:

“It’s funny how it’s like rediscovering myself all over again. There’s a tinge of the familiar, just a little, but it all feels very new, as if we’re stepping into unchartered territory. The palpable thrill of breathless anticipation, the quiet familiarity of a good friend, the sad disapointments of distance and yearning — it all feels like I’ve been there before, but not quite.

It is, I think, a sense of newness. Maybe it’s restoration, like how anything you touch takes on your nature. Things can longer be like what they were in its inglorious days. It changes. Transforms. More and more like you.

I’m still trying to find the music to fit everything in. Yasmin the Light was for the crazy rollercoaster ride before January Thirteen; Happiness: We’re In This Together for the images in my head as I dreamt, in hopeful terror, of an unformed future; Once More To The Afterlife the soundtrack as you held me in your arms in the dark and bright places; while Tracy was for the quiet ebbs and flows of the ocean at night, waiting to see how the journey would unfurl before us.

But it’s okay if nothing really fits. Because even if I can’t find the words to put everything down, or if there isn’t any brilliant music that magically places everything into surreal perspective, I just have to look to You and I see us entwined with you. When praise forms on my lips and when I feel your spirit rising within me in clarity and confirmation, that’s all the definition I need.”

It’s not always about the romance, the hearts, or the flowers. Not even the little explosions going off in your head or how you have to remind yourself to breathe whenever she’s near. Or being told you’ve used a particular turn of phrase several times to describe her and you’d never even noticed until she pointed it out. Or even coming to the painful realisation that one day both of us will, even unintentionally, hurt one another. And that she will finally get sick of me, or that I will run out of beautiful things to say to her.

But there’s no need to be afraid, precisely because everything is made brand new in Him. Water to wine. New seasons, new journeys and new beginnings. It’s walking with Him and letting Him take over. Knowing that one can only love out of the Love poured so freely into me.

Knowing that there only good days ahead for the both of us.

tore up this letter to her, so she’d have fun taping it back together.

Happy first month, beautiful.

Polar opposites. One grounds itself as best as it can in reality: no soundstages, scenes done in single takes, ambient lighting, organic performances, beautifully-scored music that captures the languid charm and beauty of the Texan skies.

Another is deliberate in every way: colour, framing, symmetry, juxtaposition of visual elements, heightened artificiality, tongue-in-cheek script, and grandiloquent music.

Sometimes, I wonder how the both of us can be so different. But so similar. There is, I think, nothing that can be argued based on logic. Just like how faith and God’s ways confound the rational and supercede the natural. I can’t tell you the whys or the hows when it never was anything about me in the first place.

My answer will always be Him.