Recognition.

Love Remembers Before We Do.

For María. From María, through her looking glass.

Thirty-five years ago, I encountered someone my heart appeared to know before I did.

We met long before we recognised each other. Not when we first saw one another. Not when we fell in love. Not even when we exchanged vows, and renewed them over and over again.

Something within us had recognised the other long before we understood whom we had encountered.

On this day, back in 1995, we married. Today, we celebrate our thirty-first wedding anniversary.

There was Encounter. Then there was Life. Then Marriage.

Years of tending the fire: children, wounds, work, joy, separation, return, becoming.

Recognition came much later, in 2017.

It did not invalidate what had come before. It revealed it.

And recognition asked for something more: Consent.

The conscious yes to what life had already placed before us.

And with our consent, we consciously welcomed Mystery into our lives.

Perhaps some encounters cannot be understood when they happen. They have to be lived.

We live forward. We remember backward. And sometimes meaning arrives from another direction altogether.

Thirty-five years ago, I wondered: Who is this woman?

Thirty-five years of loving María have not answered the question. They have made it larger. Because genuine recognition does not eliminate mystery. It deepens it.

I know María immeasurably more intimately today. And perhaps because of that, I know how impossible it would be to reduce her to everything I know about her.

My heroína did not descend from her pedestal so that I could possess her. She descended so that I could meet her.

And after all these years, I am still meeting her. Again. And again. And again.

The spark became a fire. We tended it. We fed it. We sometimes nearly lost sight of it. Until one day we discovered that this fire could even burn water.

Our Hieros Gamos.

And today, on the anniversary of the vows we continue exchanging every day, I understand recognition differently.

I once thought recognition meant finally knowing who she was. Instead, recognition has taught me to remain in wonder before who she is, and before who she is still becoming.

Perhaps that is what it means to love: to recognise the beloved, without ever believing we have finished discovering them.

May we recognise those we love, not once, but again and again.

May familiarity never extinguish mystery.

And may we remember what the heart knew long before we did.

Te amo y siempre, te amaré,