Eleven months isn’t supposed to be a constellation anyone notices. It’s the small notch between neat numbers, the almost-anniversary. But month eleven is where my sky learned a new center. Before you, my days rose and set on whatever I could will into motion—travel, work, friendship, survival—like a planet faking its own sunrise with a flashlight. Then you arrived, and the light stopped coming from me. It came from you.
Before your orbit, I kept moving because motion felt like safety. Hawaii was proof my body still turned: ridgelines like jagged horizons, waterfalls that bruised the air with mist. I climbed, I swam, I stood in winds that pressed my chest like a palm and thought, this is what dawn feels like when you have to make it yourself. Even then, night kept its say. In Washington, I searched for monuments the way flowers lean for light—stone and bronze that promised endurance. I wanted a noon that didn’t waver. I left steadier but still my own weather system, hauling a portable sun from room to room and pretending it was enough.
New York with Shelby glittered—billboards, ferry wakes, a musical that felt like standing in warm light with strangers who knew the same lyrics. We collected moments like sunbeams in a jar. But when the AC hummed and the dark made everything honest, I could feel the chill of a sky without a star. I told myself a practical truth: you are fine. Fine is a dusk that doesn’t freeze you. Fine will do.
Less than four weeks later, the horizon brightened for real. You walked in.
You didn’t come with thunder. You came with warmth—the kind that doesn’t argue for itself. Your laugh reached me like first light finds the floor. Your patience had the temperature of morning on a kitchen tile. You learned my silences and didn’t flood them; you let them soften like frost in shade, certain the sun would get there eventually. You didn’t fix anything; you changed the weather.
We are both people who like our calendars arranged like sundials—clean shadows, reliable marks. Control is our mutual eclipse when we let it be. I’ve heard my own voice and winced at its glare, the remark that burns instead of brightens. So here is the work I’m choosing in your light: pause before the flare; ask if you want shade or shine; step away and come back without heat damage; say “you’re right” like it’s daylight, not an apology; keep our gentleness photosynthesizing.
You give me proofs that look like afternoon: a drink placed in my hand before I know I’m thirsty, the hum you don’t notice, the way you angle the straw so I don’t have to turn my head on treatment days. When chemo metals the tongue and time stalls, you don’t narrate heroics; you stand like a south-facing window and let the room warm. Sleeves pulled over cold fingers, refills tracked without trumpet, jokes delivered on the beat where dread would have rooted. We are not outrunning night; we are living through it with a sun that shows up.
Our work nights in the car feel like comet tails—two silhouettes crossing a map that’s learned our names. Porch lights flicker on like tiny dawns. Hallways smell of detergent and last week’s dinner; a grown man hugs a toy and grins like someone opened a window. Bags pass between us the way rays pass through leaves, and when the app goes quiet your fingers trace orbits into my arm at red lights. The road becomes a ribbon of soft noon, and errands turn into hours that glow on their own.
Daisy, severe astronomer of my heart, has charted you. She watches, squints, approves, then collapses against your leg in that precise way she reserves for heat sources. She nips only a little—solar flares are to be respected—and I respect her science. She has never once misplotted your course.
Sometimes I try to reverse-engineer the star you are: patience, humor, stubborn gravity, soft edges, bright truth. Blueprints buckle. You are not a bulb to assemble; you are a body with your own fusion, constant enough to set clocks to, gentle enough to sit beneath.
Then came the question—no eclipse, just the clean shift of light when a cloud moves on. You asked like a man who trusts daylight, and every contingency I’ve ever filed evaporated. The yes was there already, like the way a room says “morning” before a single word is spoken. In one breath, the hours I’ve treated like borrowed sunlight turned into a season I get to keep.
People talk about romance like fireworks. Yours is the longer astronomy. You set the handle facing the hand I use. You turn our playlists into afternoon. You text “I miss you” and the words throws a rectangle of brightness across the floor of my chest. The ring is a brilliant flare. The dailiness—the way you keep rising—is the part that grows things.
I am thankful every morning, but it’s a liturgy under the laugh: thank you for choosing to rise here. Choice is sacred. You could warm other rooms. You stand in this one—this city that is a comma, not a period; this chapter where we sharpen pencils over budgets that are rude and hold a straightedge over blueprints that look ambitious. This isn’t a waiting room. It’s a solarium. We’re building a bridge and breaking in boots under a skylight we didn’t have a year ago. When my dream looks bigger than my courage, you crack a window and the air moves.
I am not easy; I can be all edges—glare where glow would do. You don’t dim me; you teach me where to soften. Our fit is heliography: we learn the angles that keep us warm without burning. This is the only perfect I trust—not flawlessness, but seasonality. We have our summers and our overcast. We carry umbrellas and sunscreen and keep walking.
So here are my vows, stripped of fireworks and dipped in daylight:
I will check the weather I’m bringing into our room and leave the storm at the door.
I will match apology with repair the way dawn matches night with color.
I will ask what love looks like on a Tuesday and do that ordinary miracle.
I will guard your wild and tend your tired.
I will memorize your first-laugh-of-the-day and do my work to deserve the second.
I will pause before heat becomes scorch; I will choose glow.
The road ahead is a galaxy of doors. Some will open like automatic blinds; some will stick; a few will swing wild at the worst possible time because comedy has excellent timing. We’ll move zip codes and habits. We’ll fight about dishes and decisions with the same earnestness. We’ll apologize at intermission, not after credits. We’ll celebrate month marks because why ration sunshine? We will keep saying yes in units that can be counted: hours shown up for, shoulders borrowed, mercies repeated until they become architecture.
Eleven months is not eternal by any calendar; by our sky, it is. It is the crossing from survival-light to lived-in daylight, from “I’m fine” to “we’re us,” from a single, battery-powered beam to a star that keeps time. When I look back now: Hawaii taught my body to turn. Washington taught me vows can outlast weather. New York showed me the outline of the shadow I was ready to fill. And then you—sun, not spotlight—made the rest legible.
So here is month eleven, unframed and bright: two toothbrushes standing like slender sundials; Daisy curled into the warmest bend of your knee; playlists turning errands into golden hours; a ring that doesn’t rescue but anchors; receipts filed, sleeves tugged, pills counted, silence warmed; your palm finding the small of my back as if a cartographer marked it “light here.”
Let’s keep turning toward what grows. Here’s to this unfussy month. Here’s to every unnoticed minute we turn radiant. Here’s to you, my sun. Here’s to the yes that rises, again and again, and calls the day by its name.