Long weekend

Satu and I were lucky to get two whole days of a 3 day weekend together. We did all kinds of couple things like meet another couple for dinner and tell our slightly embarrassing stories to new people who will tell us theirs.

We went to Home Depot and to Lowes and giggled about landscaping ideas and the odd chipmunk scampering through the patio section. Satu bought a bee house and helped me figure out the right blocks for our (possibly toxic) fire pit. For the rest of the afternoon we sat outside and planted flowers and just listened to podcasts.

To our 20ish friends who spent the weekend camping and hiking and defiantly smoking cigarettes while they manufactured emotional drama, this weekend probably seems boring. To me, it was perfect. Satu kept looking over and asking me why I was making goofy faces at her. Obviously it is because I feel like I live with a superhero. I feel so lucky that I often feel like I with someone who is so awesome that she is a legend.

possibly toxic

I never get tired of being around her. She always surprises me and makes everything better. When I worry, she finds a way to calm me. When I am hyper, she lets me run myself down. When I giggle for no reason, she will giggle with me just so we can laugh together.

I never thought in my life that I could be with someone that I can trust like her and admire and be endlessly surprised and fascinated with. I usually have more fun at home with Satu than I would anywhere else in the world.

Is this the first step to being an old lady? I don't need to go out because everything I want is here in my home (as long as we remember to get groceries.) I don't go out for retail therapy because I don't care much about anything that I don't already have. Our lives are happy. We can watch cheesy sci-fi shows or listen to old radio stories (which she has on dusty tapes somewhere).

It's sad to me that two days together seems like such a vacation. I think most people get this every week, but I realize that I am actually starving for this kind of time with her. I like getting up slowly and having coffee together before busy body-ing around the house. One day soon I would like to climb maybe one more rung up the corporate ladder so that we can afford for Satu to live the life of the artist that she is instead of suiting up in her work clothes every day to go do a job she hates. Hopefully soon we will have two day weekends every week. How sad is that for a dream?

47 years

Satu has been on this planet of ours for almost 47 years. I often like to think of what it would be like if I had known her for all of them. I feel lucky to have known her for almost 10 years, but I feel like I missed 37 possible years of laughing and knowing her. Satu is my best friend. The sound I love most is the sound of her laughter, but the little animal noises that she makes when she is just satisfied are a close second.
 I feel like my 12 year old self  when I am with her. When you are young, all your dreams about a future life are really simple. You never imagine drama or mixed feelings, just your happy home and good times. I feel like that is what my real life with Satu is like. I am living a 12 year old fantasy with an amazingly hot wife. We have breakfast together and cuddle up at night. Mostly we laugh and just can't get enough of each other. If I had known Satu when she was 15, we would have talked about fantasy books and probably scooped up frogs in a net. We would have ignored the world and talked on our incredibly heavy phones with twenty foot cords.

If I had met Satu when I went to college at 17 she would have been my instant crush. I would have listened to all of the bands that she liked while thinking about her. I would have spent my morning jogs convincing myself that I was exercising to be confident and pretty for all of the making out I would be doing in my mind. I would be practicing conversations about her and trying on all of my hats before finally just going back to the Indiana Jones one which is the only one I liked. I imagine that she appeared perfect in any situation. Bam! Grocery store at 2 am drop dead gorgeous in a sweat shirt with messy hair. Could she be on the next aisle? What if I run into her on the quad? She's probably really busy and would only make eye contact for a second, but in that second, she would fall in love with me.

If I met Satu when we were in our early twenties, all of our friends would have been part of setting us up. There would be elaborately fought get-togethers. She would be the life of the party and I would probably just be someone's roommate, but for one night, the best of my life, I would join the party and feel like I turned the page in my life.

If I had met Satu in my late twenties, I would be a little more calm, but feeling lost about where I fit into the world. We would talk all night long and reflect on the long stretches of life behind us while feeling that what we do now determines all that lies before us.

If I had met Satu before I joined the Marine Corps, I would have sworn loyalty to her ahead of my country. Would I have gone to war? Could I have, knowing that my true purpose was not to sacrifice my life or to risk it, but to live it with her?

What are the next 47 years going to be like? I feel like I am living all of my earlier fantasy lives at once with the woman of my dreams. There can not be a better life than this, and yet my own life with Satu gets better and better. Every day that we wake up together, I feel like I found peace and purpose in my life. I don't care at all if we end up being ignored by kids as we slowly walk up the beach in our eighties. I don't care if we drink cheap coffee and wear flower prints in our 90s. Every second that I get to spend in love with Satu is a second I spent feeling like my full self.