I watched him sleep yesterday. I sat there in bed with the laptop, and he snored beside me, and I couldn’t help watch and think that I’m one lucky sod. I’m not sure what I’ve done to deserve it. Not much. So today we’re going to say what we said eighteen months ago again, and still the repeated words will mean everything. Everything.

It can become routine, sometimes. It can become so that both of us take all this we have for granted. Then, all it takes is a look to see his hair spread out over the pillow like a halo, and there’s a new stab wound in the heart. It is funny how love sometimes is more pain than pleasure. The old insecurities ply their trade, and start to nag like little demented voices inside my head. It turns the warm and fuzzy into anxiety and fear.

We’ll have been married for eighteen months soon, in february. Next month he’s going to be 20. Then in March it’s my turn. And I can see us together when we’re thirty. Forty. Eighty-five. Unless I screw it up somehow. Unless he realises there’s better people out there than me. Unless he realises that I’m a clingy fraud that pretend to be his mental match.

But my bouts of insecurities aren’t as black as they used to be, because he’s there to lift me up. When he smiles, it’s like a supernova that flares two inches from my face. It chases away all the darkness around my soul, it does.

I’m never letting go of him, so I won’t screw things up, because the cliché is true after all. Isn’t that so with all the clichés? The reason things become cliché is that their truth is so common that whatever it is, is overused as a template. Some people are more worth than yourself. Some people are worth dying for.

When my parents divorced, all they had left was a certain fondness for each other. Nothing more. That fondness, and mere habit, was the reason they stayed married for so long. I always thought everyone ended up like that. I always thought Mark and I would end up like that, unless we ruined everything and became hostile to each other.

I don’t really believe in marriage for life. That’s more an American cultural thing. Evidence says that most people divorce, and separate. But looking at him, what I feel haven’t diminished. Is that not weird? What I feel has just changed. Not the intense eruption of feeling – more the deep, deep lava flow of heat. If our first months together were a super nova, this is the molten core at the centre of the Earth. Hot as hell still, but inexorable and eternal. Not the burning candle with wicks at both ends like it used to be.

That sort of makes me happy. Right? So this morning when we went up at six in the morning and drove off, there was a purpose to it. At eight we walked into a bed and breakfast in Brighton, and that’s where we are now. What we’re here for is a private thing, just for the two of us. No family, no relatives, just Mark S and Colin A who will restate that which we said eighteen months ago. We’ve signed the documents at a registrar’s office, just us two, this morning. A quick thing. We were in, then out. Not much fuss. Not much ceremony this time.

Later, we’ll repeat those words we said back then – and we still mean every word. At least I will. The promises we make to each other, those are the important ones. The rest… the rest is just a bit of theatre. The words, and their repeated meaning, means all the world. Now I just have to wait until the evening. Might as well write to keep my fidgeting hands in honest work.