We're going through changes

Tonight I reread some of the emails that my husband and I exchanged after we first met in a chat room in early 2004. I haven't looked at them for about six or seven years, and it was bittersweet to read them. Even though we love each other, it's no longer the same love we shared in those emails; we're not those people anymore. In a lot of ways, I miss who we were back in those days when everything the other said (or wrote) was wonderfully exciting, those days when we counted the hours until we would talk again, when we shared the minutiae of our lives and hung on each other's words, when we finally met and shared that first breathless kiss...

Things have changed now. They have to, I guess, as we evolve, as we grow older, as our circumstances alter and fluctuate--living together, getting married, having children, weathering the ups and downs of day-to-day life. It's a different love now--not better or worse, but different. And I know that our love will continue to evolve as we go through life, as we grow older, as our children leave home to pursue their own dreams and goals, as we settle into a life with only each other to hold on to. I look forward to growing old with my husband, to seeing who we become.

But my heart does ache a bit for those lost days, for those two people who were so much in love.