Dear Matthew,
On the eve of ten months, I’m putting it all in writing, because love deserves a record—even the messy parts, even the parts where I am not the hero of the scene. I know it’s “just” a month-iversary. I know it’s supposed to be silly. But if I’m honest, I’d celebrate every Tuesday if I could. Every uneventful grocery run. Every quiet car ride. Every small, ordinary moment when you are next to me and the air is easier to breathe. Ten months is only the headline; the daily is where the miracle lives.
We’re both Type A, which means our calendars try to boss us around and we sometimes confuse planning with safety. You boss me around and I allow it in a way I’ve never been able to and I know for a fact that I do the same to you. It also means the room can fill with static when I think I’m being efficient and you think I’m being… me. I have a sharp tongue and an itch for the last word. We both are particular and want to do things our way and yet both of us are constantly allowing the other to make the call. People say “quick wit” like it’s a compliment, and sometimes it is, until it’s not; until the speed becomes a knife that nicks the person who’d hand me their last bandage. The other day I overheard a recording of my own voice and flinched—at my cadence, at the edges of my sarcasm, at the way I sounded like the guy I never wanted to be. I’m not asking for a free pass. I’m telling you I heard it. I’m telling you I’m working on it.
So here’s what work looks like for me, not just prose: I will count to three before the joke that only defends me. I will ask, “Do you want a fix or a hug?” and believe you when you answer. I will step out of the argument for a glass of water and return softer, not colder. I will say, “You’re right,” with my whole chest and then make the change that proves I meant it. I will not let my cleverness eat our kindness. I will be the man you deserve—through what I do when no one is watching, and especially when I think no one is listening.
And because love is not only vows, it is proof, here is what you already do without ceremony: You take my hand. You sit through the TV for hours. Ignore me in the morning when my pill bottles sound like tiny maracas of dread and hope. You witness me on the highest doses of oral chemotherapy like a dare to my own body, and you are unflinching—not performatively brave, just there, steady, the kind of presence that tells the storm it has met its match. You remember which snacks don’t churn my stomach. You track refills. You tuck blankets around my stubborn edges and you do not mistake my silence for distance.
At night we DoorDash side by side, and the city tilts into a scatterplot of chaos—arguments in passing, humor so low it doubles back into brilliance. Abilene becomes a carnival of porch lights and people watching—unsettling enough on its own. Sometimes a front step flickers alive like a stage cue when we roll up. We stumble on crackheads, croon “Happy Birthday” while handing over toys to grown ass men, and wander through breezeways thick with stories disguised as smells: detergent, stale takeout, a candle burning louder than its scent.
Bags pass between us like secret notes, and when the app falls quiet, your fingers map soft spirals into my arm from the driver’s seat. We drift through every subject and none at all—the day behind us, the strangers we cast into imagined futures, the playlist that transforms tired roads into film scenes instead of errands. You turn exhaustion into a duet, a team sport with rules only we know. You make delivery runs feel less like work and more like fragments of a book we’re writing in real time.
Daisy has chosen you, which says more than any poem. She is discerning, a tiny bouncer with a velvet rope around my heart, and you—somehow—got on the list. She watches you with that fierce little gaze and then sighs against your leg the way she does with me when she has decided you are family. I trust her read on people more than my own some days. She only bites you a little, which is a lot for her, which is both funny and true.
You are beautiful, inside and out, which I say not because I’m auditioning as your hype man (though I am absolutely your hype man), but because it’s a fact. The outside is easy to praise—your smile that looks like mercy, your blue eyes that hold steady even when everything else flickers—but the inside is where you undo me: the way you listen without loading your reply; the way you make space for my fear without shrinking yourself; the way you celebrate tiny wins like we just pulled off a heist. You carry patience like other people carry their phones: always on you, always charged, always an extension of your attention.
Beyoncé gets a thank-you from me every morning for the simple, exquisite fact that you wake up and choose me. It’s a prayer disguised as a joke; a gratitude disguised as a pop reference. Choice is the holiest word I know. You could be anywhere, but you’re here, in Abilene, in our strange in-between—the city that holds us while we gather the resources and courage to leap. You chose to be with me in a place I am choosing to leave, and there is a complicated tenderness in that math. It’s not a waiting room, it’s a workshop. We’re building the bridge and the boots we’ll use to cross it, and you are here for the blueprint, the budget, and the pep talks when the blueprint looks unrealistic and the budget looks rude.
You support my dreams with both hands. Not the Instagram version of support, but the actual kind: you read drafts when your eyes are heavy; you remind me to eat when the sentence is more interesting than lunch; you shoulder hours so I can chase pages; you frame the future like a window we can open, not a wall we keep bumping into. You do that. For me. Daily. Without an itemized invoice for emotional labor, without weaponizing your generosity. I don’t know if I could have built a better partner in a lab—and believe me, I’ve tried in my head, assembling the blueprints, specifying “patience,” “humor,” “stubborn loyalty,” “soft hands,” “hard truths,” “music taste that forgives mine,” “kindness that knows when to be fierce.” The prototype never stands up to you. You are not buildable; you are, miraculously, you.
Here is another truth that makes me ache in a good way: you take care of me in a way that doesn’t make me feel small. Care can condescend when it’s thrown like a blanket over a person’s agency. Yours is different. You make care feel like sovereignty—like I get to keep being me, mouthy and particular, even while I’m sick; like support and dignity are not opposites. You open the door, yes, but you also step back and let me go first. You drive when the world blurs; you hand over the keys when I need to remember I still can.
I’m not easy. I know that. I can be an asshole. My humor snaps when it could bend. My certainty barrels when it could breathe. You have somehow found the trick of disarming me without disowning me. You stand your ground without turning our room into a battlefield. You show me better without making me feel like worse. Every time you do that, you put one more brick into the version of us that lasts.
When the pills taste like metal and the clock forgets how to move, you anchor me with the simplest gestures: the sleeve you tug over my hand when I’m cold, the straw you angle so I don’t have to turn my head, the way you make a joke precisely when I need it the most and the silence gets too loud. You make illness feel like a thing we are facing, not a thing I am failing. You remind me that surviving is not a performance; it’s a practice. And you practice with me.
I have lived enough life to know that “perfect” is a dangerous word. But there is a kind of perfect that is not about flawlessness; it is about fit. You fit me. Not by shrinking or stretching yourself, not by sanding off the corners that make you you, but by meeting me where I am and inviting me to meet you where you are. Our edges talk to each other and decide, together, where to soften and where to stay sharp. That is a perfect I trust.
The future is a long hallway full of doors. Some we already have keys for; some we’ll have to pick; some will swing open at the exact wrong moment because life loves a bit of comedy. We’ll move—geographically and otherwise. We’ll build the life that looks like us, not like a brochure. We’ll fight about nonsense and about real things. We’ll apologize in the middle, not after the credits. We’ll celebrate more month-iversaries than any sane couple should, because why would we ration our joy? We will make a home that remembers every version of us and still offers room for the next one.
I want to tell you I’m proud of us, not just because of what we’ve survived but because of what we’ve chosen. We chose ordinary. We chose the unglamorous logistics that keep the lights on. We chose to make care a daily verb, not a holiday. We chose “How can I help?” over “You should have.” We chose to laugh in parking lots and kiss in kitchens and hold silence without filling it with fixes. We chose to celebrate, even when the world would say “Ten months? That’s not a thing.” It is to me. You are to me.
I promise you this: I will keep doing the unromantic maintenance no one writes poems about. I will clean up the mess I make, literal and otherwise. I will bring the apology and the action that matches it. I will learn you, not just love you. I will remember the first version of your laugh that was only mine and keep treating it like a treasure map. I will speak gently to the places where you are tired, and I will guard the places where you are wild. I will be the person who sees you at your smallest and calls you back to your real size.
If love were only a feeling, I would still be a flood. But the miracle of us, Matthew, is that love also looks like car seats adjusted without being asked. Like receipts filed. Like “I grabbed your favorite drink because today looked hard.” Like a hand at the small of the back when the crowd swells. Like the dog already curling into the crook of your knee because she knows where the warmth is. Like Beyoncé lyrics muttered at sunrise that are actually a prayer: please let him keep choosing me, and let me keep becoming worthy of that choice.
On this ten-month mark, I want to honor the scale of what you’ve given me: steadiness in the middle of treatment, laughter when my body forgets how; a place to land in a town that’s not our last stop; a partner who is brave in exactly the way I need bravery to look—quiet, daily, backlit by small mercies. I don’t need fireworks when I have your hand in mine and the steady click of a turn signal heading toward whatever’s next.
Happy ten months. Thank you for being here—for choosing the slow miracle of ordinary days with me. Thank you for every night we chase deliveries and come home with stories. Thank you for letting Daisy declare you hers. Thank you for holding the line when I want to run my mouth, for laughing when I can’t find my words, for being beautiful in all the ways that make beauty feel like a practice and not a prize. I love you beyond any clever thing I could say; I love you in the way love is supposed to count: in hours shown up for, in shoulders leaned on, in the relentless, ridiculous decision to stay.
Tomorrow I’ll probably try to make a joke about this post because vulnerability gives me hives. Hold me to it anyway. Hold me, anyway. Let’s keep celebrating every day we get to do this. Let’s keep building the life that fits. Let’s keep being the team that turns errands into evenings we don’t want to trade for anything. Here’s to ten months and every little minute inside them. Here’s to you, Matthew. Here’s to us.