ONE YEAR AGO, TODAY

Life comes at you fast.

Those words come from a series of chuckle-rendering television commercials selling insurance, but I'm sure that the marketing gurus behind the catchy phrase weren't the ones who first coined it. Perhaps it is merely a more conservative, modern version of the old "shit happens" idiom. Either way, the very statement those five words make is wholly profound.

Life really does come at you fast. In a flash, everything changes. And more times than not, they are changes that you weren't necessarily looking for. They are changes initiated by things that seemingly come out of nowhere and just sort of take you by surprise. They are sometimes the best things to happen to us in our lives. Grounding things.

As I write this my wife, Dawn, and I are just now entering our first year of marriage together, and while we are far from strangers to one another (we've been together for going on three years now), there is still much we are learning about who we are. As anyone familiar with this path can surely attest, being married to someone is vastly different than simply being with someone at varying times throughout the weeks and days. To be sure, no one is nearly as refined in real life as in the impression-setting moments during the dating process. Marriage and being together all the time has a way of revealing some things. My wife has determined that in real life I'm a pig, for example, and that by the evidence of the food crumbs that regularly surround my plate at the dinner table, a fork appears to have been a tool I only recently learned how to use.

Hey, I am her knight in shining armor. She even told me so once or twice. And she did marry me. She is my princess, and of course I did marry her. But eventually the armor must come off to reveal the man inside. And for the record, a princess must eventually, too, hang up her tiara. At the end of the day we are, of course, people. We all have our irks and quirks. Some of them will excite and intrigue us. Some of them will make us melt to mush. And others...well, let's just say this is a tale that has been told more than once.

The long and short of it is that it's an adventure. A journey. And for better or for worse I'm having the time of my life. Change is good. Profound change is good. We've moved from the duplex I own with my mother and bought a new house just down the street. We've had the misfortune to endure the deep emotional pain of a miscarriage, though on the bright side we had a glimmer of the special excitement and joy the prospect of a child will one day add to our lives. We've made important discoveries about each other, and we've grown ever closer, and ever more in love each day.

A year is a short time, relatively speaking. Yet, even though it's only been a short time, in an odd sort of way there is this surreal sense that it has always been this way. That we have always been this way. Whenever I hold my wife in my arms and feel her warm caress, whenever I kiss her tender lips, I feel like this is a place that I've known forever. I feel like this is a place that I never want to leave. It feels good and it feels right.

It's been one year ago, today that my wife and I were married. Life comes at you fast, and I'm ready for whatever comes our way in the next year. If it's anything like the past year, I can't wait.