## What the Anniversary Actually Is
Our tenth anniversary came and went while Nathan was at the coast with his mother. We didn’t mark it that day, which felt strange in the way that all absences feel strange when you’ve been anticipating a presence.
A few weeks later Nathan asked me where I’d like to go. Not for the anniversary trip we’d planned — he wasn’t trying to recreate that, exactly — but for the trip he wanted to take me on. His phrase, which he used deliberately, was: the trip I want to take you on.
I told him I still wanted the coast. The inn, the cliff walk, the four nights with a sea view. He said okay.
We haven’t gone yet. We’re planning for late spring — after the counseling has had more time, after the pattern has been tested in more ordinary moments, after we’ve seen whether the Sunday morning with Elaine was the beginning of something real or just a good moment in a larger story that hasn’t resolved yet.
I am still deciding about the marriage, in some sense. Not dramatically, not with one foot out the door — just in the ordinary way that any honest person is still deciding, still reading the evidence, still waiting to see if the thing they’re invested in is going to become what they need it to be.
That is not a catastrophe. That is marriage.
## What I Know Now
Ten years is long enough to build something. It’s also long enough for the thing you built to obscure things about yourself that you need to see.