Travis to Megan:
My beloved. It's been a long time in coming, but we're finally here.
And after all this time I can't promise much. I'm not all of a sudden going to remember to pick up my socks all the time or get all the mail out of the living room. I'm not going to be a different person tomorrow than I was yesterday. We're going to go home to our life together and once the cats remember who we are it will be the same as it always is. And nothing could make me happier.
I come to this day with no regrets. No missed opportunities. I have spent the last week celebrating this event with most of the people I love best in this world. And will spend the rest of today and this weekend celebrating with the rest of them. And it has been wonderful. These people saved my life, and have helped make me who I am. And, I missed you. And every second spent without you pointed out the simple fact that you are my life. You are my family. Thank you for choosing me.
Thank you for being patient with me while I learned how to be in an adult relationship.
Thank you (in advance) for being patient while I continue to learn.
Thank you for pushing me out of my inertia, thank you for wanting the more for me that I never push for on my own.
Thank you for questioning me.
Thank you for not accepting my easy answers, or my pat answers or my hyperbole.
Thank you for putting up with the bluster and the depression and my need to be right.
Thank you for sharing your life with me. You are amazing. I am jealous of your drive, and your passion, and your never ending quest to be better at everything you do.
I know it's hard to see sometimes, but I love our life together. And I love you.
Too often in my life I have taken the easy way out, getting by rather than really achieving, and dealing with people as characters rather than as themselves, always looking for the story in a relationship. But I've never been able to do that with you. You are real.
And I realized that this was forever, when I realized I didn't want some story. I want the real. I WANT to work on our relationship. I don't want the easy way out - I want to get it right. I haven't managed to figure you out yet, and I'm glad I get the chance to keep trying. I can't imagine sharing this moment with anyone else but you.
I want to show you every day how beautiful you are.
I want to keep you and our partnership in its proper place in my life no matter how chaotic it may be.
I promise to consider that you just may be right.
I promise to try to be more open and available to you.
I promise to love you the best I can for as long as I live.
For the rest of my life I want to be your constant. I want to be home for you, no matter where we might be, or what we might be doing, I want to share every moment of whatever may come with you.
Megan to Travis:
My beloved,
I have had many people walk in and out of my life. I’ve had very few choose to stick by me. I am not an easy person to know, to love and to stand by, continually, repeatedly, through all the dark times while believing the better times are coming soon. I’ve been amazingly blessed to be able to call you my friend, lover and partner for most of the past decade. I didn’t use to believe that anyone would stick around once they knew the worst parts of me. You’ve done so over and over again. You have helped me through the hardest periods of my life and your strength has given me strength to heal. You’ve taken the grey in my life and turned it into blue, and you have helped me become a whole person not by supplying me with you as my other half, but by showing me how to be whole on my own.
Over the past ten years we have discovered how much love, patience, and strength it takes to build a lifelong partnership. For the past six we’ve learned how to live with one another, which is a different skill entirely from driving to your Dover apartment for our post-X Files rendezvous. I love that we’ve supported each other through our development as artists and as adults, through separations brought on by our careers and the move away from 70 degree San Francisco heaven to the 100-degree heat of the not-quite-a-real-city Austin. Today I offer my vow to never stop building on those things that have gotten us where we are today. I offer you my hand in yours for life, through the bad times and the good times that lay ahead. I vow to do my very best to support you and challenge you creatively. I vow to try my best to have patience with you and with myself as we continue this journey. Life, like our relationship, and like our honeymoon, takes a lot of work, and I vow to continue to find the strength to do this work with you so that we may enjoy both the journey and the view together at the end of the climb. I vow to try to keep my crazy cleaning binges under control, or to at least tell you where I’m moving everything of yours so you can find it again; and should the Red Sox ever play in the world series on the same night that a Lost season premiere airs, I will do my best to keep perspective on the relative importance of these events and sit with you while you enjoy baseball. After all the Lost obsession, the David bowie obsession, my love for installation art, the cats, bizarre performance art and (to quote you) “angry, angry feminism that has nothing to do with you,” it’s the very least I can do.
Our marriage, like our love, will be a lifelong journey to create a work of art. I can’t wait to see how that continues to unfold.
In your light I learn how to love
In your beauty, how to make poems
You dance inside my chest,
Where no one sees you,
But sometimes I do,