If You're In Love, You're the Lucky One

Top: Target; Skirt: Lilies (similar); Shoes: ShoeDazzle

I'm sitting here in my quiet, dark apartment waiting for Ben to come home, watching the most beautiful sunset I've seen. The sky is lavender, and sky blue, peach and deep red, yellow and black. The sun is setting over the west Puget Sound and I'm heartbroken thinking about leaving. 

But I'm in love, and I'm a lucky one. 

I may be sitting here watching my favorite sun, set over my favorite sound, but I'm also waiting here for someone I love to come through the door. And I'm going places with him. Down the freeway, but not far.

Before Ben left for Africa, three months after we'd started dating, our sophomore year of college, I made him a board book full of memories. I printed photos of our first date, of the second and third. I drew us in the margins and wrote ten loves notes in a pocket in the back. I made him a CD. The artists on it were from the Pacific Northwest exclusively - Rocky Votolato, Death Cab, and The Head and the Heart, to name a few. It was supposed to be a memory of home. And Ben brought it back, four months and 10,207 miles across continents and oceans, covered in red dust and travel smudges and crinkles on the photo corners.

This board book of memories that is us, holding hands on late Friday nights and watching the sun set over the Puget Sound, is just in motion again. We're traveling, packing our things in suitcases and backpacks and boxes, and looking to smudge up our spines and crinkle our edges. So I'll try to think a little less about what I'm leaving and a little more about what we're adding to our story - just some red dirt on the cover of a book of memories