One year ago today, I stood on a mountain in Hawaiʻi with the wind in my face and the Pacific unrolling itself in that impossible blue. It was the kind of view that makes your chest go quiet—the kind that feels like an answer without words. I had come there alone. I was traveling alone. I was fighting cancer and doing the hardest parts of that journey in the privacy of my own head, alone. On that ridge, under a sun that made the water look like melted glass, I had a realization I didn’t expect: I might be alone for the rest of my life, and I could still be okay. Not resigned, not bitter—just okay. I felt my shoulders settle in a way they hadn’t in years. If it was just me and the horizon, I could make a life by myself. With my chosen family.
I remember the details that day: the red dirt on my shoes, the small, stubborn pride of carrying my own bag up the trail. The idea of “okay” felt radical, like a soft rebellion against all the ways I had measured myself by who stayed, who left, who showed up, and who didn’t. I promised myself that I would learn the art of staying—staying with my fear long enough to breathe through it, staying with my joy long enough to actually feel it. If love never came, I would still choose a life that felt like mine.
A little over a month later, you arrived—over the phone at first, then all at once. You didn’t walk in like a solution. You didn’t pretend to be a cure for anything. You came in like a person: whole, complicated, earnest, light on your feet in ways that surprised me. I think that’s why I trusted you. There was no performance to decode, no mask to peel back. You asked real questions and then actually listened to the answers. When I tried to make a joke to dodge the hard stuff, you laughed with me and still circled back to what I had tried to avoid. You showed me that care can sound like simple sentences and look like ordinary choices, repeated.
I couldn’t have designed someone more right for me if I’d been given a blank check and a lab. You are not “perfection”—thank Gaga. Perfection is glass; it breaks when life gets loud. You are honest and sturdy and tender in the ways that matter. When I falter, you’re the one who steadies us. When you wobble, I find my foothold and take the weight for a while. You don’t run from my sharp edges. You meet them like someone who’s done real life and learned that love is less about sanding someone down and more about learning how to hold them safely.
With you, my problems shrink back into their actual size. The things that used to echo loudest—old insecurities, old trauma—go quiet when your hand finds mine or when you tilt your head like you’re saying, I’m here, stay with me. You stand next to me, not in front of me and not behind me. Even on the days when I’m not proud of how I show up, you show up anyway. You’ve never promised me that everything will be easy; you’ve kept promising me that everything will be shared. That promise is the one that changed my life.
In less than a year, we squeezed in enough miles to redraw my map. We traced the California coastline like it was a sentence we didn’t want to end—San Diego’s long, lazy sunsets; the rain storm under the redwoods where every breath felt like life; the neon grin of Las Vegas and the desert mornings that felt like some kind of reset button; the Grand Canyon, where the earth opens and reminds you how small and how welcomed you are; Los Angeles with its unruly sparkle; San Francisco’s hard-earned charm; Sausalito, where the water carries conversations from boat to shore and back again. We learned the rhythm of traveling together: who grabs the snacks, who checks the route, who sets the playlist, who narrates the scenery just to make the other laugh.
There were the little rituals that stitched those trips into a story: the unremarkable diners where the food was somehow perfect because you were across from me; the way we stood a little too long at scenic lookouts just to memorize a color; the times we pulled over for a photo and stayed longer than expected because the moment was better lived than framed. I look back at that calendar and realize how often we chose the long way on purpose. Loving you turned detours into destinations.
I think often about the 16-hour drive I made in December to meet you in Chicago during your training. Winter had settled in and the roads asked for patience. It would have been reasonable to wait, to say “after the holidays,” to punt the reunion to a more convenient line on the calendar. But love makes different math. I remember the feeling of pulling into the city like an exhale I’d been holding for weeks. I remember the quiet of those evening hours after your training days, the simple pleasure of a shared meal and exploring the city together and not having to narrate how much I missed you because you were right there. The journey didn’t scare us. It taught us what we were willing to do to end it.
Meeting your family was its own kind of homecoming. They opened their door and their holidays and treated me like someone who mattered to you—because I did. Acceptance isn’t a speech. It’s an invitation to bring your whole self. I felt that in your family’s house as we split tasks in the kitchen, swapped stories, and learned each other’s rhythms. Two holidays later, I left with a quieter heart and a louder sense of belonging. That’s a gift I’ll never stop counting.
We learned how to live together in Austin—nearly eight months of practicing the ordinary. There is a different intimacy in figuring out who rinses the dishes and who folds the laundry, in discovering that we both have particular ways we like the pillows arranged, in learning to apologize for small things quickly so they never have the chance to grow teeth. Love leveled up in those months, not because of fireworks, but because of consistency. You made a habit of kindness. You turned the concept of partnership into a daily verb.
And then you did something I still don’t have perfect words for: you chose Abilene. You chose me. You put your life on pause and then pressed play in a new place so we could build something that belonged to both of us. People sometimes talk about grand gestures like they’re the pinnacle of romance, but the grandest gesture I’ve ever received is you deciding—deliberately, practically, bravely—to be here. To plan a future in a way that isn’t hypothetical. To be my support through the dark times because love isn’t afraid of the lights going out; love knows where the candles are kept.
You’ve never treated my history like a project. You’ve treated it like a landscape you’re willing to walk with me—some parts steep, some parts wild, all of it worth the view. When the medical part looms or the what-ifs tried to steal my sleep, you didn’t overpromise. You scooted closer. When I spiraled into old stories, you didn’t scold. The language you brought into my life is simple and strong: We. Us. Here. Now. I didn’t know how much I needed those words until you made them feel like home.
We have collected a museum’s worth of small, ordinary days. We have also survived the kind that show you where the floor really is. Through all of it, I’ve watched you be steady in ways I’m still learning to name. You laugh like someone who knows joy is a strategy, not just a reaction. You argue like someone who believes in repair as much as being right. You dream in specifics—places, plans, timelines—and you bring that same specificity to the ways you care for me. It looks like a glass of water set down before I realize I’m thirsty. It looks like a text that says I’m thinking of you at exactly the moment my courage dips. It looks like a hand on my back at a crowded party when the noise gets loud.
You’ve seen me at my best and at my most human. You don’t flinch. You don’t itemize. You don’t make my hard days about your disappointment. You make them about our strategy. I didn’t know love could feel like that—calm in the center even when the edges are frayed. You call me forward without shaming where I’ve been. You celebrate my wins louder than I do and hold my losses with a tenderness that makes them less sharp. We are not perfect people, but we are good to each other, and that’s the kind of perfection I believe in now.
The thing about traveling so many miles with someone is that it redefines distance. It shrinks what used to feel impossible. It proves that time can be bent by intention and that place can be remade by presence. We have turned airports into reunions and long car rides into confessionals and quiet mornings into the kind of sanctuary you don’t learn to build until life requires it. When I look back at the map we’ve drawn this year, I see more than cities. I see evidence: that love can arrive after you’ve made peace with your own company, that it can deepen without spectacle, that it can turn a life from survivable to luminous.
Today, you asked me to marry you.
It was a redundant question in the holiest sense because I decided nearly a year ago. I said yes before there was a ring, before there was a date, before we had an address that belonged to both of us. I said yes on that mountain without knowing your name. I said yes when I watched you listen like it was a skill you’d been practicing your whole life. I said yes on freeway exits and in parking lots and at kitchen sinks and in grocery aisles. Today, I simply caught up to all the yeses I had already whispered into our days. Out loud. For the record.
I don’t need a fairytale. I need exactly this: a life where we choose each other on Monday mornings and in July heat and in December winds; where our plans have room for the unexpected but our commitment doesn’t wobble; where we keep learning how to talk to each other even when the topic is uncomfortable; where we refuse to perform a perfect relationship when what we actually share is a true one. I want the paperwork and the party, sure—but more than that, I want the continuation of what we’ve already started: a home that we build with the things only we know how to make together.
You are my person. You’re the sun, not because you blind me, but because you warm the places that cold used to claim. Being in your orbit doesn’t make me small; it makes me steady. You give me gravity and room at the same time. I used to think love was supposed to feel like fireworks, and sometimes it does, but mostly it feels like waking up and realizing I slept through the night because you were breathing next to me. It feels like the courage to schedule the appointment. It feels like returning to a kitchen where the light is good and the Diet Dr. Pepper is already cold.
The promise I want to make is this: I will keep building a life I’d be proud to live even if I were alone, and I will keep choosing to live it with you. I will keep practicing the rituals that keep us close—saying thank you, saying sorry, saying I need a minute, saying I’m here. I will keep learning the language of you: how you get quiet when you’re overthinking, how a certain crease near your eye is the tell for a joke you haven’t said yet, how you like your comfort delivered—direct, no garnish. I will keep telling the truth even when it’s messy. I will keep asking for your truth even when it complicates the plan. I will keep choosing us over being right, future over pride, tenderness over speed.
To those reading this, thank you for cheering us on, for giving us tables to gather around and memories to remember. Love doesn’t happen inside a vacuum; it thrives in a neighborhood. We’re grateful for ours. If you’ve walked an airport with me, FaceTimed us from your kitchen, mailed a card, sent a playlist, or simply texted “thinking of you,” you are part of this yes. We feel you with us. We’ll need you in the next chapters, too—the ordinary ones and the flashy ones. We hope to celebrate with you soon.
And to you—the you who turned my quiet “okay” into a loud “yes”—thank you for every time you showed up without fanfare and changed the day. Thank you for making room for my history and inviting me to make room for your dreams. Thank you for the miles and the minutes and the mundane. Thank you for choosing me when it was easy and when it was exactly the opposite. Thank you for the question you asked today and for the million ways you answered it with your life before you ever said the words.
A year ago, I stood on a mountain and made peace with the idea of living alone. Today, standing next to you, I am grateful for that peace because it taught me how to recognize the kind of love that doesn’t try to replace my strength—just amplifies it. I don’t know what the next year will bring. I do know this: whatever it is, we will weather it the way we always do—together. With snacks in your man bag, a plan firmly in place on multiple apps, matching eye-rolls at whatever chaos the day tries to deliver, and a hand squeeze that means we’re good.
Yes. A thousand times yes. To the road behind us, the home we’re building, and the future we get to write together. You’re my person. You’re the sun. And I am happily, willingly, joyfully staying in your orbit for the rest of my life.