A Valentine for a Lifetime

Like every Indian bride to be my dream of what my wedding was going to be like and what it actually ended up being were two very different things. In the end of course the only thing that mattered was that K and I were married. But the one thing I did want that I never got to do was to look into the eyes of my beloved and say my personal vows to him. I wrote them in spring of 2007 in a random Peets coffee shop in Mountain View or Palo Alto and while time has passed and the world moved on, my feelings remain the same but stronger still. Below I have edited those wedding vows into a valentine of sorts.

For my K, the only person I know who is the same whether someone is there to see him or not, who is as good a man in the dark as he is in the light.

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Somewhere a butterfly caressed a flower, a dolphin curved out of the ocean and a vanilla buttercream cake rose perfectly in the middle. That same day, a typical damp London evening, I met you and the world rewrote my future. It’s entirely inconsequential that we barely spoke or that our meeting lasted all of half a minute. For my love that’s all it took for my heart to never ever be satisfied with mediocrity again. I wanted to compose words that were not cliché sounding and dripping sugar but when your love tastes like honey to my heart, what, truly, am I to do? K, since you have graced my dreams every single one of them have danced true. Sweet thing – you are a jazz standard that that I want to listen to time after time, you are the dream that makes me smile in my sleep, when you enter the room you leave me silent for a second, when you go, a deep empty space takes up where you left. My very best friend, the one I trust more than anyone else, the gift I knew God was saving to give me, the one that my soul recognised far quicker than I did. Love is everything I believe in and you are everything I love. Since the moment I have known you, you have been nothing short of extraordinary; my life – with you – has been nothing short of extraordinary. I feel blessed, privileged and at times even shocked, that exactly when time deemed it so my light within was able to so match yours that we were able to clearly see and find our way to each other. My love for you has no depth or breadth or ceiling or grounding – it is bigger than the earth, the galaxy or the universe –it is bigger than you or I and it is bigger than anything I have ever known before. My love for you existed before I did and it shall exist long after I am no more. For my love, my love for you is as energetic as the messages between the stars, the infinite knowledge within the planets, and the supreme intelligence you and I both know to be God. I could say I love you, my everything, over and over again and still it would not be enough. So all I ask is that you honour me by continuing to share your life with me and allow me to try and show you every hour, every minute, of every day, how joyous, how awed, how inspired I am that you made the journey and effort to find me and how so very very much I appreciate your presence in my life. Before you I had only questions; after you I have only answers. For all these reasons and a million more, I ask that you be my Valentine for a lifetime.

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