Today is our 5 year anniversary.

I do not take this lightly, and in fact, because I am an emotional masochist, I use life’s most special moments as a reminder that we’re all going to die one day. Before you yell at me, let me explain.

The love I feel for this man is unequivocal to any I’ve ever felt before. He is my good karma and the true joy in my life. His heart beat is the soundtrack I fall asleep to as I lay on his chest. Our love makes me realize life is a gift, one that should be constantly savored because we will all find ourselves looking at a shoebox of photos marked “past” that grows more and more each year.

This is what I think of as I look at our stack of printed photos, mostly early-era moments of our relationship. A candid of us at our favorite dive bar in Miami Beach the night my car got a flat and it rained all over us, another of him with the camera I gifted him for his birthday, us two on my  25th birthday on the beach, then there’s the ambience photos we took of all the cool date spots we used to take each other.

And it occurs to me, we aren’t those people anymore.

In five years we managed to grow up and evolve in ways that girl with soaked hair in a bar booth would never have known.

Who will I be when I look back on my present self next year? It’s hard to imagine. Each part of me, physically and emotionally, can be traced back to a million little and big decisions. Seriously, even the perfect wavy curls in my hair are a result of past me trying to get it just so.