I’ve shared some photos and videos from the day of our anniversary throughout the post. I thought I’d mention for those who listen to the voiceover, you can come back and check those later if you like.
A couple of months ago, on a long weekend morning, we woke up to our thirteenth anniversary.
Nabeel and I met nearly two decades ago, eighteen years to be exact. At the time, I was living alone by myself in Karachi (Pakistan), away from my family, surrounded by people who never made it easy to be a single girl in an unknown city. Nabeel was the first person I met who had absolutely no judgments, no questions for me. He didn’t ‘accept’ my life, he joined me.
You know, I wasn’t someone who was ever looking for a partner, I never thought about when I’d get married, or who that person should be. I think the only thing I knew was that I always wanted to breathe free, and meeting Nabeel was like finding this secure person to live side by side with me.
And now from 20-somethings to 40-somethings, we’ve been each other’s constant and evolution, all at the same time. I used to think I wasn’t romantic, and then I discovered stories of love within the repetitions of our daily life.
“Come see today’s sunset.”
“Do you want to have chai?”
“I filled your water bottle for you”
“I found these books you’ll like”
“Come sit with me while I work”
Things like that ♡
Looking at him that morning of our anniversary, as we prepared breakfast together, I told this to him for maybe the millionth time: “It feels like I just met you a little while ago and yet also like we’ve known each other all through our lives”.
I thought for this week’s issue, I could share a little from how we spent our anniversary this year together. And now almost 18 years down, maybe I could also share some things about relationships that I feel have kept us stronger together.
This past year, we’ve had some financial stress, and we’ve not spent on too much in general. And so, when we thought about what do for our anniversary this year, we decided to go really simple with our celebration. To be honest, we don’t really do anything extravagant anyway, but this year we’d actually been hoping to gift each other something specific, that we then decided to park for another time. I’m a very spiritual person so I try not to see such phases as highs or lows, but as opportunities; ones that shape your character, your value set, your emotional hygiene.
And so, like many other choices that we had made through the past few months, we decided to also enjoy this day in a different way. I think as humans we can sometimes live in fantasies of the future, instead of savoring the abundance of today. Even when there’s less of one thing, there’s always more of another. And so, this anniversary for us was about the more of today.
Anyway, it was a day before, on Sunday afternoon…
And we were hanging out over our kitchen island, talking about what we’d like to do. We decided to make something nicer than usual for breakfast in the morning, Nabeel said he wanted to cook dinner for me later in the day, I told him I’d write him a letter. And to make things more festive, we thought to do an anniversary exclusive grocery store trip that evening to go get things for that special breakfast and for Nabeel to cook dinner.
We made a quick menu – chicken karahi, my favorite with naan (that’s chicken curry with bread). And with that done, a couple of hours later, we were at the store shopping for supplies.
You might think I’m being really silly, but I think there’s a magical feeling around doing something specially for an important day, even if it’s as ordinary as moving a shopping cart through aisles and picking out ingredients for a recipe. As we went through the same store we’d been to a hundred times, it still felt so sweet to be doing this; like coloring the same page but with a different pen. I think human imagination is an incredible thing and I remember reading this quote by Oscar Wilde sometime back that I feel says what I’m trying to say so much better. It goes,
“Love is fed by the imagination, by which we become wiser than we know, better than we feel, nobler than we are: by which we can see life as a whole.”
It’s great, right?
Anyway, we filled our bags, and were just about leaving the grocery store, when I saw something: Sunflowers in the floral section. Now I love sunflowers, and I keep telling Nabeel that we’ll buy some on a special day. They’re not always there at the store so seeing them while we were anniversary prepping felt like such a delight.
I think it’s great to get things right away that bring you joy, but it’s also really lovely to wait for them at times. They were just $15 a bunch, so I think it's not always about the price tag, but how much you’d appreciate them when they become a part of your life at the right time. And buying those sunflowers that day was my right time.
On our way out, as I was walking through the parking lot, with the sunlight falling on those yellow blooms warming them up to the most beautiful shade of gold, I can’t tell you how grateful I felt in that moment.
We had enough food in our hands, we had enough to buy a non-essential like the florals, we were in good health, and we had the imagination to see colors around us, when to be honest, it was really just the same day as yesterday.
We had enough.
Back home, I put my flowers in water