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Note #37: Twelfth anniversary (2009.3.6)

I have another entry in the works, but before I get to that I thought I would mention that yesterday Hyunjin and I celebrated our twelfth wedding anniversary. It seems like just yesterday that I posted a look back at our first ten years of marriage (if that link just brings you back to the front page, hang on—my host just went through a major upgrade and things are a bit funky). It’s hard to believe that it has already been two years since then.

Twelve years. That’s almost a third of my life so far. The longest relationship I’ve had outside this marriage lasted a couple years, I think (my memory is a bit fuzzy, as were the boundaries of that relationship), which is nothing next to twelve years. And this is only the beginning. It’s hard to believe, but my parents recently celebrated their fortieth anniversary. Now that’s a long time.

Thinking about this anniversary, I am reminded of a short game I played a while ago, called Passage. It’s a very simple game, but it had a surprising emotional affect on me. One of the things that stuck in my mind about the game is how you meet your spouse so early on in life, and you spend a majority of the game traversing the landscape together (although you can skip marriage entirely). It just makes me think about how my life before I met my wife compares to my life after I met my wife. We’re still in the relatively early stages, but as time goes on, this marriage will become a greater and greater part of my life as a whole. I’ve only spent a third of my life with my wife so far, but my parents have spent well over half of their lives together. That blows my mind.

I wish I had something more meaningful to say, rather than just sitting here with a blown mind. Unfortunately, though, I don’t have anything more meaningful to say. I can’t really put my feelings into words right now. So instead I’ll leave you with a photograph of what I prepared for our anniversary dinner last night. We had a bad experience with a Korean pizza place recently, so I thought I would erase the memory of that horrid excuse for a pizza from our minds with something special.

This is the first time I’ve actually tried decorating a pizza, and the symbolism should be obvious. Then again, that’s ground beef, ham, and sausage smothering the thick layer of cheese, so I suppose the heart might stand for “heart attack” as well. It was good, though, even more so because it was something we were able to share.

I think if I were to come across a magic lamp and the genie inside granted me one wish, I would wish that my wife and I would be able to grow old together. I suppose that’s rather selfish, seeing as I could have wished for world peace, an end to hunger, or things like that, but I honestly can’t think of anything I would want more from life.