XX

April Fool's Day, we decided, was our relationship anniversary date. We weren't quite sure, when we were established enough to be trying to figure it out, exactly which day the party had been on, but it was the last Thursday of the Easter break from college that year. Not that we were officially "going out" instantly - it took a few weeks, maybe a month, to be sure we were allowed use the boyfriend/girlfriend tag for each other. We knew it had been about a week after B had turned 20, so April first seemed right. I decided not to be insulted by the date's practical-joke connotations. It was an omen of laughter, nothing more.

But it's hard to believe that it's been twenty years since I first heard all of Negotiations and Love Songs for the first time, whiling away a lazy Sunday afternoon in his house. What makes it sound so long ago is that it was before we'd ever sent an e-mail, before we'd seen a digital camera, long before we all had phones we could take with us, before anyone had thought of Facebook or Twitter or blogging. We managed to conduct a romance perfectly well without text messages or status updates. We called each other on the home phone; when we arranged to meet in town, we showed up. We used payphones now and then. There was cherry blossom and Paul Simon and pizza and the last Dart home and losing whole afternoons in kisses. And missing the last Dart home.

That was the first beginning, of course. There were endings and beginnings a-plenty again after that, because we both had other things to do and people to see and places to go. It was eleven and a half years before we sealed the deal, and not due to what you might call a long engagement. Just a long and chequered courtship, all the longer for not knowing that it would all turn our right in the end.

But the tipping point has arrived and now we've known each other for longer than we haven't; and I'm surprised it took so long because it feels like we should have known each other for ever and also in previous lives.

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And then you have children and the whole thing goes into overdrive and you wake up one morning and wonder how you got to be almost forty, and how you got so lucky as to have everything you ever wanted. And a mobile phone to boot.

Happy 20, B the B.