7 years, 21 days...and counting

Many people might not know this, but last month marked the seven year anniversary of Bri and I meeting for the first time (November 12, 2001; at about 7:15 pm). Admittedly I missed the moment to mention this at the time, but so did Bri–so I don't have to feel too bad right? So anyways, I thought that I should share this brief insight into how I felt the first time that we met. Not my words, but certainly the same experience:

The woman who first gives life, light, and form to our shadowy conceptions of beauty, fills a void in our spiritual nature that has remained unknown to us till she appeared. Sympathies that lie too deep for words, too deep almost for thoughts, are touched, at such times, by other charms than those which the senses feel and which the resources of expression can realise.

The mystery which underlies the beauty of women is never raised above the reach of all expression until it has claimed kindred with the deeper mystery in our own souls. Then, and then only, has it passed beyond the narrow region on which light falls, in this world, from the pencil and the pen. Think of her as you thought of the first woman who quickened the pulses within you that the rest of her sex had no art to stir. Let the kind, candid [brown] eyes meet yours, as they met mine, with the one matchless look which we both remember so well. Let her voice speak the music that you once loved best, attuned as sweetly to your ear as to mine. Let her footstep, as she comes and goes, in these pages, be like that other footstep to whose airy fall your own heart once beat time. Take her as the visionary nursling of your own fancy; and she will grow upon you, all the more clearly, as the living woman who dwells in mine.

[...] familiar sensations which we all know, which spring to life in most of our hearts, die again in so many, and renew their bright existence in so few [...]

By: Wilkie Collins, 1859

I couldn't have said it better myself.