Absolutely Everything

Last year, Melissa woke up on her birthday, on our vacation in tears, in pain, in frustration over sounds beyond her control. Everything inside of her was screaming, pulsing, raging, in a battle against the worst stages of pulsatile tinnitus. Understandably, we cut our vacation short and drove home. Seven hours. On her birthday. But this year, today, on her birthday, while the war is not over and the sounds have never completely settled, they have certainly quieted, enough that she can enjoy the long walks and the complicated hikes we take to peaceful places, enough that this time around, we even added a day onto our vacation, to enjoy moments like these, where the roars and the ripples of the water offer a different kind of silence. This beautiful, brilliant, and tenacious woman is absolutely everything to me. Absolutely everything. And this is indeed a happy birthday.