This is the part no one really prepares you for. Not the logistics, because those we learn; we schedule and sort and label, we track what travels with us and what disappears into crates, we manage timelines down to the hour. But loving someone in the middle of a PCS, while one chapter is closing and the next has not yet taken shape, asks something quieter and more deliberate of us.

Anniversary week has a way of making a person look backward for a moment. Not toward grand gestures or sweeping declarations—the sort of things people imagine when they think about love stories—but toward the quieter accumulation of ordinary days. It is the sort of week when you suddenly notice that a life together has not been built in dramatic moments at all, but in a thousand small and steady choices.

So today I am setting aside my usual reflections for a moment and writing something a little more personal. This letter is for my husband.