Thursday, April 08, 2004
5 Years Ago
...on this very day, it was Easter.
Dan and I went to church that morning and decided to hang out at his place that afternoon. It was a strange afternoon because he spent most of it being very quiet. It was only late in the afternoon when he finally spoke his mind.
That was the day Dan told me that he liked me. 5 years ago, this day, we got together.
*grins stupidly*
I've known him for 5 years, have been married to him for almost a full year and in some ways, it really feels like yesterday that we got together. I still remember it was a really nice day with blue skies and I wanted to go to the beach. Of course, as fate would have it, I felt too lazy when we got back to his place and spent the time watching an old episode of "Growing Up"- this locally produced drama that wasn't all that bad.
But as well as I remember the events of that day, the following week after that is a total blur. I asked Dan a few days ago whether he remembered what we did the following week after we got together. We both remembered it was the Easter break then, but for the life of us, we couldn't recall much of what happened that week.
It's strange though. I remember snap shots of that first dizzyfying week. I remember having a Subway lunch with him on the beach after ballet and I remember watching two movies- Life is Beautiful and Payback (one very good and one very bad) but I really can't remember if we hung out at each others' house or we talked alot on the phone and for some inexplicable reason, it's suddenly very important that I know what we did during that time.
I'm rather panicky that I don't remember. Dan said it was a perfect illustration of why people blogged or wrote in diaries. I'm sure if I could find all the emails I had written at that time, I'd be able to track all that we did, but I changed 3 computers since then and the emails have disappeared into cyber oblivion.
It's nice though, to know that we've been together for so long and we've come a long way. That first year was hard, much of it my fault as I still tried to hang onto someone who wasn't what I made him out to be and just generally getting used to one another which wasn't an easy task. I was proned to foul moods with the amount of pressure I put on myself and the last serious girlfriend he had was a voice over the phone for a better part of the relationship. But hard as it was, we got through it- although at some points, we weren't so sure we were going to survive and here we are today.
Today's also symbolic because today was the actual day that we really really really wanted to get married on. The fourth day of the fourth month of the fourth year (some may argue fifth, but I'm going for some sort of continuity here) of the new millenium. How cool would that have been? We vetoed the idea though seeing that to the Cantonese (and half of Daniel's clanspeople ARE Cantonese, including his mother and only surviving grandfather), it was an inauspicious date*and marrying on a date which resembles "death, death, death" would lead one to the same fuzzy ended logic resembling that of my student's where our marriage would be "cursed".
And even my Bible thumping, superstition non-believing mother decided it wasn't a good idea to tempt fate...not exactly in those words since "fate" is a very un-Christian concept. I think she went for the merry go round rationale of "better be safe" and "shouldn't play around with these things" instead of letting those words leave her lips.
Heh.
So yes, five years. May not seem like a long time to a lot of people, but it's a nice milestone for us. I asked Dan if we were going to celebrate the 4th of April like we've done the past four years, or whether we should just celebrate our wedding anniversary which is a bigger thing. I think we'll celebrate both because even though the day we got married is a huge deal, the 4th of April in a broader sense, is more important.
I found out sometime later that Dan had told our friend Sharon that if I did said no that day, he would have turned around and walked out of my life, even as a friend. So, while I cannot speak in any certainty for Daniel, on hindsight, my life has been a million times better and exponentially richer because of him. I'm glad I said yes that afternoon and to me that's worth celebrating because if I hadn't, I wouldn't have a best friend that I live with and can crawl into bed with right now. :)
*The number 4 is a homonym to the word "death" in Cantonese
Ondine tossed this thought in at 15:20
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" Far in the stillness, a cat languishes loudly"