Dear Grace,
look what I just discovered. I’m currently updating my websites and linking my portrait photos to the credits of the photographer who took them. To check if these links work, I look at her website and what do I discover? Us. She was also the photographer at our wedding.
Our wedding. I know you would have imagined something bigger and better. For me, that day was perfect. I was able to take you as my wife, the woman I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. I was so in love with you—I would have killed to be near you. We didn’t have much money and, yes, I can see that now: maybe I should have put more effort into the preparations. But for me, it was still perfect. You were by my side, nothing could go wrong, and everything else—a bigger celebration, a church wedding, or a celebration with your family in Kenya—could have come later. After the years before, in loneliness and silence, you were the light in the darkness for me. The person with whom I wanted to start a new life from scratch and finally leave the past behind. Everything seemed possible to me. A dream.
Perhaps this step was hasty, but I always wanted to be there for you and protect you and the family, never let go again, and build a life together in which we would look back happily and contentedly. And immerse myself more and more in your life and in the distant place where you come from. I am grateful: everything could work out; with the love we felt, anything would be possible. I married you of my own free will, innocent in my intentions and, yes—I know that now—naive in my belief in what lay ahead of us.
Dear Grace, you deserve the best in life, and I believed that I would be able to offer you that someday. You could accuse me of being unreasonable and immature. Perhaps. But I don’t regret that day, and if I were to meet you again one day, just as I did then, I would take the same step again.