I’m growing aware of how easy it is to become sedated by stability.  How quickly I can be lulled into half-consciousness by the same route to work every day, receiving a jolt of adrenaline only when I look up to see red taillights and once again test my brake pads in response.  How a normal workday with normal hours and normal expectations can carry me through a week without rapid emotional fluctuations between anger and tears.  How a beautiful home with a beautiful man (ha–he’ll love that) allows little discrepancies from beautiful, like crumbs on the floor, to seem bigger than they are.

Such issues did not exist in New York.  My walk to work involved dodging homeless people and dog poop, so alertness wasn’t an option so much as a survival tactic.  Working with the country’s richest kids one day and the world’s least motivated students another provided no shortage of both frustration and stories–and trips to the wine store on the way home.  And no matter how well they’re renovated, life in pre-war apartments and dates with pre-grown men do not lend themselves to spotless interiors.  New York was a constant alarm clock where a walk around the block required–and maintained–all five senses at their limit.  Life in Atlanta is…slower.

Which is good, because one of the reasons we left the city is because we didn’t want to live in a state of perpetual exhaustion.  The thought and effort required to maneuver around that tiny island demanded all of me.  Until I met the BF, I was happy to give it. Then we began to plan a life together and realized we were looking for some things the city couldn’t give.  Of course, leaving it means we will always miss some things that only the city can give.  But when we thought about the family we hope to have, New York City made more sense as a place to visit.

This weekend, we drove out to Vinings to buy our wedding rings.  As we made the purchase of the symbols of our lifelong commitment, I realized we already are a family.  The building where the jeweler is located has windows overlooking much of Atlanta, and I gazed out of them at our new skyline.  More compact and slightly shorter than the old one, but surrounded by green.  Room for us to grow.  And as we do, as we become a God-sanctioned family in a month and continue to be one through a thousand other points in our future, I’ll look back at our story so far and the thousand places where it began and grew.  A glance across a church lobby.  A conversation in a crowded bar.  A proposal on a rooftop under the lights of the Empire State Building.  A ceremony on a beach.  And…the thousands of days after those. Days of early-morning alarms and sleepless nights, of crying kids and dirty countertops, of laundry piling up and toilets stopping up.  In the sedation so easily produced by monotony, I can imagine the risk I face of majoring on countless minors, of letting life fly by my car window, of gripping the dust buster more tightly than my partner’s hand.  I pray I’ll be awake enough to grace to take a moment and enjoy the view of all that got us here and all that we’re building.  The function of daily life sustained by commitment.  The structure of monotony fueled by persistent love.  The city surrounded by green.