The Perfect Imperfections of Our Relationship

I think about you all the time - when I’m driving, when I’m working, when I’m alone, when I’m in the middle of a crowd. I think of your eyes, your smile, the smell of your shirts, and the feel of your fingers wrapped around mine. You laughing at something totally silly and me just getting "it" right away. I resent work and the demands that keep us away from one another throughout the day. I want to spend my every breath on you. It's weird because even when we're mad, happy, no matter what, I still want you there. To be mad with me, to be happy with me. Doesn't matter, just there...together.
The way I think about you - the fantasizing, the wishing and the longing - borders on obsession. Because while a good majority of what I think is pleasant, passionate, and romantic there’s the other side, too. The side that wonders what you could be doing right now, and then realizes it could be anything, and I’d never know.
These trust issues that I have - this constant worry that I’m being made a fool, the rush to find something out before you can betray me - it’s not your fault. I was like this before you, and probably always will be. I’m the product of one too many bad relationships, my own indiscretions, and a mind packed full of stories of men deceiving their women. It’s all shaken inside of me, and I come out with this cocktail of suspicion, mistrust and fear.
It hurts me the most when I’m feeling particularly insecure - because of hormones, a fresh story or a stale memory. Those days, it’s all I can do to smile. Lifting the corners of my mouth feels like such a colossal effort, when my mind is thick with questions, feelings and probably tinged with my own guilt as well.
They say that if you have to ask a psychic if your other half is cheating, then you already know the answer. And that a women’s intuition is nearly flawless when seeking out betrayal. But I don’t buy that. I think that there are women out there, like me, who have been given every reason to trust and believe and fall into the soft security of a once-in-a-lifetime kind of love, yet cannot shake their demons, the little voices whispering into their ears. The demons that make them check the computer history, and find themselves unsatisfied with whatever they unearth: If there’s nothing, their other halves were just good at covering their tracks. If there’s something, then…Well…There’s something. The demons that make them ask questions so obviously directed at seeking out his whereabouts, making him - without asking directly - account for every minute of his day. The demons that suggest that phone call he’s making - right in front of you - is to his other girlfriend.
And you’ve been nothing but incredible most times. You’ve been honest and forthright when you need to be, and you’ve told me the little white lies when I needed them. You’ve shared your life with me. We’ve been through death, disease, surgeries, robbery…We’ve seen parts of the world together, and parts of each other that no one else has ever seen. We talk about our future. You call me every night on your way home from work, you devote every minute you can to me. And yet, still I wonder. Maybe it's because of the past, our past, and my own. Maybe it's because I still have thoughts, and you are insisting that you don't.
I don’t call you when I’m on my way home to you, almost hoping to find you mid-transgression. I don’t want to give you that warning shot; I’m just going ahead and firing. I think about our future, but I leave it open and remind myself that nothing is set in stone. You suggested, that we should get tattoos together. I recoiled and knitted my eyebrows, worried that doing that is too permanent. Because what if you leave? And although I did it anyway, you never went through with yours.
I’ve been told for years - years that knew me before I knew you - that I wasn’t worth sticking around for. That someone better than me would come along. I was reminded that I’d never be thin enough for anyone.
I still wanted to get married. After all of that, after all of those hurtful words, all of that possibly irreparable damage, I still wanted to get married. Because I was weak and hurt and it seemed the only way to patch up the broken me that I’d become.
I had to force myself to move on. I cried for weeks on end, I didn’t eat. I barely slept. And somewhere around the time that I found myself getting better, you found me. You took me in and you tended to my broken pieces. You saved me.
And, now, sometimes, I forget myself and take all of that history out on you. I do. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry that I snoop and dig and seek things that aren’t even there; I’m sorry that I make you constantly defend and reiterate that you love me, that you’ll always be around, that you’re never going to leave. “Don’t you know by now that I love you?” you say, “After all that we’ve been through? You think I could just wake up one day and not love you anymore?” I don’t know how to answer you, though. Because I know what you’re getting at when you say those things: That you do love me, that my insistence to the contrary is so obscene that it’s crazy, that your words are almost rhetorical, meant to remind me that my believing otherwise is pure nonsense. But yes. Yes I do. I think that love to me means more than it does to anyone else, including you. I believe I love you more. And yes, I believe that one day you will wake up and wonder why you ever let me in; wonder why you ever kissed me in the first place, got married, had our kids, loved me at all.
And believe we both know all too well that marriage doesn’t fix things. And I know you’d never do anything to hurt me. Just like I know that the sky is blue and Florida is humid and taxes are due on April 17th. I know it. But, sometimes, I just can’t understand it? I can’t internalize it? The rational side of me knows the score, but my irrational side tries to persuade me otherwise.
I’m just grateful for you being here, and sticking through it. For convincing me when it was the last thing you wanted to do. You’ll never, ever know how much that means to me.

You save me every day. From myself.