Beyond Time: How Love, Memory, and Reflection Shape My Life with Her

It’s 2024. I’m a 35-year-old father and husband, trying to put into words something I’ve only recently understood: Time is not linear. Not really. Sure, the world tells me I had to be ten before I could turn eleven. But right now, as I sit here thinking about those years—flipping through mental scrapbooks of childhood—I’m ten and eleven and thirty-five, all at once.

It’s strange. A little surreal. But the past isn’t something ‘back there.’ It’s part of the now, layered into this present moment, woven by love and memory. It’s like the more I reflect, the richer it all becomes. And nowhere does this feel truer than in my love of the one, MY only, my partner Blue.

I still remember the day I first saw her. Across a crowded restaurant, friends jabbering away in my right ear and left, the moment I'd waited all my life for, arrived. Her eyes met mine. She didn’t smile, not exactly, but there was something there—we both felt it. A lingering pause, seconds only, was all it lasted, like we both knew something was happening that we couldn’t explain. Back then, it was just a look. Space had cleared briefly for our gazes to connect as the earth hurdled through our galaxy at 67 thousand miles an hour. Today, that moment has grown into something much bigger, fuller, like an entire chapter has since been written about it.

One day, that two second memory, will be an entire book with the weight of what it represents.

How strange that a look can feel this way, that it can carry years’ worth of meaning. And how beautiful that it can keep evolving every time I think back on it.

We didn’t know it then, but that moment was the beginning of everything.

I wonder sometimes if anyone else feels this way about time. If you’re reading this, do you see your past as something alive, something that keeps changing as you do? Maybe you’re 20, maybe you’re 60. You are at least someone with years and experiences I can’t imagine, yet here we are, strangers, intersecting for some reason only we can say.

So let me ask you, why do we choose to revisit the past? For me, I think it’s about meaning. About going back and seeing if something new is waiting for me there. And almost always, there is. Take that sunset Blue and I chased early in our relationship. It was just a sunset in a mall parking lot. Not enough time to reach a mountain lookout. Which is great. Somehow the trope that the best sunsets happen in parking lots was true once again. Purple and orange painted the sky, and we sat there soaking it in for as long (actually as short) as it lasted. A simple pleasure for simpler times.

But now, looking back, I see it as a hint of who we’d become together—finding beauty in the small things, not wishing to be anywhere else but together in whatever life gave us to experience.

Then came infertility. No one plans for that experience. No one imagines they’ll face it. But when we did, the world closed in a little, grew dark around the edges. The kind of dark that makes you question everything, including yourself. It was 2020, and Covid had nothing on infertility and its stressors. Was I thinking about the future, the possibility of success and the memories that could be made, IF, we made it through? Could I predict the joy that awaited us on the other side of the journey? No, I wasn't there yet, I hadn't lived enough yet, to see the yin to this terrible yang. And yet, Blue—she carried us through. Sheer hope, blind drive. I wouldn't have made it without her.

Back then, it was just survival. Getting through each day. It didn’t feel profound or even hopeful at times. But now, years later, I can look back and see the strength she showed. I can see how she carried our dreams in ways I couldn’t. Each reflection adds another layer of gratitude, showing me that love isn’t just the easy parts. It’s the way you hold on, even in darkness. I can revisit that time that once was pain over and over again. And there is no pain to be found anymore. Only meaning. Only gratitude.

It's 2024 still. Every morning, we create something small but sacred. We dance in the kitchen with a little one. We let loose, laughing, moving, no rhythm, some rhyme. To someone else, it might look like nothing, just a typical morning with a kid and two tired parents. But to me, it’s everything. These simple moments are the heartbeats of our life together, the memories that will mean more with every passing year. The layers that bring the past into the present and heal it with attention.

I imagine myself years from now, looking back on these mornings. By then, I’ll have stacked countless other moments on top of these. Maybe they’ll change shape as I do. Maybe they’ll mean something I can’t imagine right now. And THAT'S it! That’s the magic of time—its ability to keep deepening the moments we think are already complete.

We Survived the Dark

I tell myself this often: The best is yet to come.

Every year with Blue proves it. I don’t think I understood that when we got married, when we started building this life. I thought I knew what it meant to love someone, to commit. But now, I see that love doesn’t stay still. It grows, stretches, gains weight, and richness. And each year, it shows me a new layer of itself. Light, laughter and love. Dark, sadness, and doubt.

One day, I’ll look back on today and see things I can’t see right now. I know that. It is happening now to the past. Today will be the past tomorrow and forever. I’ll have the holidays of 2024 tucked away, the memories of a new year, and all the little things that seemed ordinary at the time. I’ll revisit these days, just like I revisit our past now, and let the new experiences change the way I see them.

That’s why I’m here, writing this. Not to lock a memory in place but to let it breathe, to give it room to grow into whatever it needs to be.

Blue is my anchor in all of this. She’s the reason I see the world with so much wonder, with so much awe. She’s taught me that life isn’t about finding meaning once and holding onto it. It’s about letting the meaning change, letting it expand with each new chapter. Because every experience we share adds another layer, another reason to love her, another piece of the life we’re building. Another reason to hope that everything happens for a reason. Not because the idea of God makes it so. But because the idea of life without her makes the fact of living beside her now—heaven!

And as I look forward, I feel this incredible sense of anticipation. Ten years from now, twenty, forty—I know the depth of what we’re building will only keep growing. I can’t predict exactly how, and maybe that’s what makes it so special. This feeling of possibility, of knowing that there’s more beauty, more love, waiting to unfold. It’s not a line I’m walking but a path that keeps widening. An expansion as vast as our own universe's expansion, maybe more.

So, wherever you are, whenever you are, know this: The past, the present, the future—they’re all part of now. They’re all here, feeding into each other, giving life meaning that’s both constant and ever-changing. I don’t know how you’ll see these words or the events that are transpiring around us now. I don’t know what it all means to you or even to me the next time we think of them. But I do know that love is a force that makes time feel anything but linear. It’s the way we live again and again through the moments we choose to remember.

And with Blue, I know that every memory, every piece of the past, it’s proof that the best is always yet to come. In a dark tunnel, or the thick of a fight, they're both precursors to standing in light.

Three Butterflies that give me Butterflies