There has been a huge change in my life in the past eight months, and I haven’t really talked about it at all. Part of it – a lot of it is the impostor syndrome. There’s a part of me that believes I don’t really deserve this change, and sometimes I feel really weird talking about it.

But if I’m going to fight this thing, then you know what? I have to talk about it. Because what happened to me is the best thing that has happened to me, ever, bar none.

What happened to me… is Emma.

This is her and I:

She is an amazing woman. We’ve known each other for a while, but fell out of contact (mostly due to me being a git, which I was for a while). Then last year, she suffered a tremendous loss – her husband died very suddenly. When I found out I left a message of condolence for her, and she thanked me for it. Slowly, we talked a bit more, trading hellos and such.

Then last December she went into an emergency room for, at the end, turned out to be simple to resolve. But she was worried and she contacted me, and we stayed there, chatting a bit until she got home and went to sleep. And we started talking more.

And more.

And she was talking about how much she was tired of her current location, and I said “Well if you want to, come visit Seattle.”

She did. And we clicked. We thought we might be in love, but when she came into view, it just clicked.

She stayed for a week and I showed her around; she saw a bunch of things, like the Space Needle, and we wandered around downtown, and we stayed in a nice hotel and ate all sorts of food (some local and some not quite so – she really loves a local Italian place, Padrino’s Pizza and Pasta).

She came back at the end of May for a few days, and when it was over, we had a promise in place, that we’d someday be living in the same place, and with the same name.

Well, that promise turned quickly into an actual engagement as we realized that was what we wanted, and then we set a date… and then changed the date because we realized that we didn’t want to wait so much, and we were miserable without each other. So… in about a month and a half, I will be married to a woman I met fourteen years ago….

And what kind of woman is she? Let me quote myself, talking to her about how I felt about her:

You are glorious and kind and graceful of spirit. Generous and thoughtful and forgiving. Sometimes the timing for things could be better but that’s how life goes. Understanding when I just need to get my head unwrapped from itself and pushing me to do stuff about it because you want me to be better than I am and you are convinced of that better man being there even when I’m not 100% convinced.

And I love you.

She’s wonderful. She understands so much of the dark parts of me, because she’s been there too. And she’s been there far worse than I have. And yet through it she’s developed a strength and a spirit that is utterly unquenchable. And she’s shared that with me. She’s reached to pull me out of my darkness, when the depression and the anxiety and the sense of not being worthy threaten to overwhelm me. She’s forgiven me my screw-ups (and there have been some big ones).

She’s amazing. She is the best thing that’s ever happened to me, and I love her, and she is going to be my wife. I am so pleased to have her in my life, now, and for the future in front of me.

Emma… thank you for being there, for being, for loving me. I love you.