The home you built
10 years · 2016 – 2026
Scroll to let yourself in
2016
Café on Church Street. You apologised to the door, the waiter and me, in that order.
2017
One room, one window, a tap that ran hot for eleven seconds. We stayed two years longer than we should have because we liked it.
2018
Rained out, all three days. We played cards and you cheated at every single hand.
2019
Ninety people, one power cut, and your father's eleven-minute speech that was worth every minute.
2020
Two admissions, one job gone, and tea at 2am until it got light. That was the fix. It's still the fix.
2022
New city, no friends, a kitchen you rearranged four times in the first month. It became home faster than either of us expected.
2024
No landmark. Just eight hundred evenings of you telling me about your day while I pretend to have finished cooking.
2026
Here. Still choosing the same Tuesday.
Pinned by the door
2016 · Lived
Church Street, and the flat with the bad tap
Our song
Whatever was playing in the kitchen
November 2016
You said it was a terrible song. You still hum it while you chop onions.
Aisha —
You're asleep on the other side of the room while I write this, and you've taken most of the blanket, which is the correct and expected outcome.
Ten years hasn't been one long feeling. It's been a thousand small decisions to stay in the room. I didn't know that at the start. I know it now.
Thank you for the tea at 2am. Thank you for the year you carried more than your half and never said so. Whatever the next ten hold — I'm in. In writing, in a drawer, on record.
Yours, still — A
years, and counting
Ten years. A thousand ordinary Tuesdays.
I would still choose you.
Happy anniversary, Aisha