Grow, Baby Bird, Grow

I wanted to add more wedding photos, but this darn thing wont let me. Oh well.

We're married now! I feel like I have post-wedding depression, though. Now that the excitement has come and gone I miss it terribly.... how beautiful everything was, how fun, joyous, scarey and exciting. A once-in-a-lifetime moment! And it's over. Just like that.

Actually, it's not really over just like that. The beautiful thing about being married is that it *does* feel different. You know how friends always ask you if you feel older on your birthday, and you don't ever really because it's just another birthday. Not that we don't feel older eventually, it's just that the birthday doesn't necessarily present us with that strong of a feeling of change. It's sort of, anti-climatic.

Anyway, when people ask me if it feels different being married.... the answer is a most definite "yes!" I wouldn't have told you a few weeks ago that this is how I expected to feel, but it really is different. It's special. The love really does grow, and deepen. I feel the butterflies in my tummy when he introduces me as his wife. I'm still getting use to the name change. But most of all, I love how I look at him now, when he doesn't know I'm watching... it's a thought, a realization, that catches me a little by surprise every time. 'Oh, this is my husband' I think. And suddenly I feel a rush of love and affection, a giggle too -- as if it's secretly amusing to my self.

We've been talking about saving up to buy a house. But where? Where oh were do we want to live? Atlanta is actually extremely appealing. I've thought about out west, but I'm not that drawn to the architecture. There's just something about these east coast craftsman style homes built in the 1920's that are so, so charming. I want to have a child. Yes, already. There's so much we want to do... it's hard to imagine how we're going to get all of our ducks arranged in the proper rows. I know that I don't want to rush it too much, though, because I want to be here now, soaking every moment in. I'm anxious to grow a family, but at the same time, scared of it because once that world beings it means we are slowly marching towards our own death, as our children begin to grow and eclipse us. Wow! What a thought. And it only seemed like yesterday that we were skipping class and riding around town with the freedom of adolesence at our feet.

Your Inner Contours

Some places we're not allowed to go. Some places have big, heavy, imposing gaurds with suits of steel armor and long, sharp blades standing at attention by their sides. They are the dark hallways. The places no one is permitted. It's where the No Trespassing signs get painted in bright red paint, strung up on wooden planks and bolted to the door.

Sometimes there are dogs on the other side of the walls. Ferocious dogs. Barking and sniffing, growling and scratching. I imagine them pacing back and forth. On the other side of your wall. Where the child who was hurt still lives. Where the angry oger squats in a corner, by a picture of himself. Or is it a picture of his mother?

There are moments like tonight, when I get just a little too close to one of these walls or one of these doors. And something leaps out from some small hole in the wall I hadn't known about, a hole a part of me brushed up against. I feel the sharp sting of a bite, a wound quick and deep into my unsuspecting thigh. Soft flesh. The vulnerable teeth of your fearful dogs.

I leap at the nip. Right out of bed. Right off my seat. Right out of the room, with you. Then we are both alone, and I wonder... if it is only suddenly that we are alone, or if it is again. Or maybe, we are always alone, and I only know it when I get too close to being near you.