1.

Today is what the Boy From Work and I are calling our anniversary. As of today, I will have dated this boy for one whole year:

There's no real way for me to know exactly what day we--okay, I--finally admitted that what we were doing was dating, but I do know I have a diary entry from July 10th that says:

We were in the back kitchen with Erica. She was forming hamburger patties. BFW had his arm around my waist.

Erica said, "So, what's the deal with you two anyway? Are you officially dating?"

And we looked at each other. I'm sure he was quiet because he wanted to know what I would say. After all, I've been the one saying we're going with the flow, we're taking it easy, we're going to see how things shake out. But I figured it would be silly to say no when, really, that's exactly what we're doing.

"Yes," I said.

"Yes," he said.

And then Erica awwwwed.

Later, when we were laying on my bed and half-sleeping, I said, "Am I your girlfriiiiend?"

And he said, "Yes. Am I your boyfriend?"

And I said, "Yes."

I think it happened on a Sunday night. We would've worked together that night, with that cook. And it makes sense that I didn't write about it for a few days because that's how my life worked back then. I could never seem to capture things in the moment. Everything was moving so fast. We would work, we would come home from work, we would kiss until four or five AM, he would go, I would sleep, I would wake up and shower, I would go to work, he would go to work, and the whole thing started all over again.

It was the best way to start things with the best possible boy. A boy who--just this week--had asked me to set the alarm an entire hour early a few days in a row, and when that alarm rang each day, I would reach over and turn it off and wait for him to get out of bed and trudge off to the bathroom to start his day. He never got up. He let me turn the alarm off, and then he tangled me back up in his limbs. After a few days of that--of the useless alarm--I said, "How come you ask me to set the alarm but you never get up when it goes off?"

The Boy From Work burrowed into my neck and said, "Because that's cuddle time. I think it's important to have."

The boy was waking up an hour early every morning just so he could be fully conscious, fully aware as he held me tight. If that's not reason enough to sign up for a billion more years, I don't know what is.