let there be light

que sea la luz
abre mis ojos, Jesús
purifica mi corazón
llena este lugar
has tu voluntad

Tu salvación aquí está
un nuevo día

a tribute to us, our special third

today marks the third year anniversary of being with you, the love of my life - my first, my only and God willing, my last. the most fascinating part of being in a relationship for me remains this: we have been there for each other down to the denomination of seconds for the entire duration that we've been committed to each other - be it through thoughts, texts or in the corporeal form. the notion of love for me remains synonymous with choice. attraction to other fleeting ideals is inevitable and human, but the active choice of choosing this love personified at the end of the day for the past 1095 days is what makes our love so meaningful to me. the beauty of this exemplified by the preposition "despite" (in the sense of "despite this and that, i still choose you"), reciprocated by us both in a world only we have exclusive access to.

on 11th october 2016 i wrote: "interests are fleeting but education leading to self-empowerment is forever. i don't know what took me so long but it's this realisation that education is the only thing that will be unwaveringly for you, in multiple senses of the word. love will come when it comes, & i will wait for it - but i am done pursuing it.

i know my worth, & i will not let the world determine it on my behalf." 

i keep going back to the me before i met you because i need to remember how lucky i got and how difficult things were then. not that i wasn't whole in myself. i was already whole before i met you. in my formative college years i struggled with being passed off by the world time and again, vowing with each episode to come back stronger, smarter and more beautiful. and i attribute the self-confidence i have today in my worth and work ethic to those episodes which were (in retrospect) the building blocks of my personal growth. and this is precisely why we are greater together.

17 may 2017: "the beauty (of being whole in God and myself) is that you inhabit my heart but do not compose it, & in so doing we do not complete each other but complement & value-add to each other's lives. to have a life & career apart from each other is so important - it ensures that our relationship will never hinder, but always make both of us better persons"

almost three years later and this still holds true. beyond our shared chemistry, this has been one of the key tenets of our relationship that has made it successful. however, things weren't always smooth sailing. looking back on our journey together, i cannot help but recall those pivotal moments where we fought over recurrent issues now passé - one of the biggest ones being our life gap (attributed to our age gap), which i kept trying to convince you came with an expiry date. waiting out those 1.5 years was unarguably hard - we were both battling our own giants on our respective ends, trying not to let them get to us. and when they did, we would have another big disagreement until some hot tears were shed and things blew over until the next eruption. on my end, it was hard being four years behind - financially and career-wise, even though the pressure was always implicit. there is just so much more financial stability that comes with an established profession like medicine and four years of savings that i had felt pressured to match from the onset, which was obviously not going to happen when i didn't have a career to begin with. i was a sophomore in college when i met you, doing my best to invest whatever "free time" i had in my resume, in hopes of an optimal job offer at a big fish firm before graduation. i felt i was doing well compared to my peers because i had a solid plan from the beginning of where i wanted to take my nascent career plan and i was doing all these side career/growth things, but they never felt good enough because the fact of the matter was: i was still just a college student. the paradoxical feminist in me also struggled immensely with notions of masculine providence versus women empowerment and equality i had championed so strongly for. honestly those were some rough times, and sometimes i had wished we met at a later stage in life when i was more "settled" in life.

looking back, i'm still glad we met while i was still a sophomore in college. yale-nus constitutes the most formative years of my life. the me before college and the me after college are almost two completely different people. to have met you right in the middle of that exponential growth journey means you got to grow together with me, and our relationship got to grow together. when i look back on those growth moments i.e. me finding love at 21 when i finally had someone (you) to hold me in quiet moments of grief, solo sojourns to alicante and seoul and doing my first ever ldr, working on omnichannel projects at sephora and scoring brownie points at amazon, and even the year-long 28mc senior year semester that everyone called me crazy for - i look back and see you in all of them, silently rooting for me and being my homecoming, my place of rest and comfort. these memories are twice richer and beautiful because you permeate all of them, and we are stronger for it.

life is better together with you, with your hand in mine.
happy third, my love.