The constant of integration

the ground we covered

On our first wedding anniversary together, we chose Nashville over Florida. We chose to drive rather than fly. We spent the day at a National Park and rather than a spa. Along the green river, before a cave exploration hike, I gifted her pendant and then we changed from our hiking gear to something shiny in the national park washrooms and drove to Nashville downtown for dinner and drinks with live music.  It wasn’t normal. Yet, she and I were comfortable and excited.

In fact, 2015 has been anything but normal. At the end of 2014, we got married. But this year we began to figure out what that actually meant. Our attempts at understanding our union were constantly punctuated by a series of major changes.

At first, she moved from Munich to Ludwigsburg. Our honeymoon had us sun-soaked on heavenly beaches. Right after, there was some clarity to where I was headed and she plunged in to making her own destiny. We called Madrid our last vacation in Europe, naively. A couple months later, when it was certain that we would move to the states, we found ourselves on a road trip to the south of France following Van Gogh’s footsteps in high summer. That was our last vacation in Europe, before we packed bags and bookshelves and moved ourselves over the pond, back to where I was before, in Ann Arbor Michigan.

In the US, we couldn’t rest to fathom the string of changes. We were off to the races finding a new car to propagate my other new car dreams, a house to settle into and  a new routine to make us feel at home. My wife sought her own respite between forced football games, welcome autumn maple leaves and first-time pumpkin carving attempts.  Much was achieved between the weekends spent vacuuming and ironing but our coupling was still unscratched in matter of depth.

2015 wasn’t a normal year for us. We turned a year old, she turned older and I approached pure muscle oldness. Yet, between us arguing over petty issues, we found comfort snuggling into each others backs. We welcomed each other in the morning with hot cups of tea and whistled away nights with concerns, epiphanies and Hollywood movies. We agreed on a crazy multi color carpet in the living room and she aced the driving test. We found local spots we could walk to and people we both did not want to hang out with.  We were together before but we were one now.

There is much more on our professional fronts we want to achieve. We both want to be far better human beings. We still want to travel endlessly even if that means crossing state and country borders. And now that after three months, we have found some kind of a routine, we eagerly await to understand what this marriage has brought us. Year two and 2016 are thus eagerly awaited.

This has been year of a constant change. It was tiring but thrilling. And in all honesty, I do hope 2016 isn’t vastly different.  That we are kept on our toes; that we have to keep deciding and adapting to the flux around us; that we now join hands in the pursuit of happiness and wheels. And in that rate of change, we end up deriving a constant, a known quantity that is us and our union, to which we agreed to, in wee wee hours of a December Delhi Day, deliberately.

That would not be resolution, rather, our decision.