Today this text is for Lu.

Even so, I decided to publish it here because she has been in almost every story I have told on this blog, including the ones that seem to be only mine. So if you follow what I write, it is fair that you know more about the person who was there while almost all of it happened.

Twenty years ago, I started counting the days.

At the beginning of our relationship, every day I updated my MSN Messenger status with the number of days Lu and I had been together. Later I used that count again in my wedding speech.

Today it reaches 7,305.

Twenty years sounds abstract, almost like a title. But 7,305 days does not. It was 7,305 mornings, conversations, decisions, problems, crazy projects, changes, and moments when one of us needed to stay beside the other even without understanding exactly what the other was seeing.

We talked on almost every one of those days. The few exceptions were the days when Lu was in a coma in an ICU, when we were still very young.

Then came the wedding. Then the companies and the projects that took much more time than they should have. Lu stayed beside me through all of it, supporting me even when she could not see what I was seeing, but trusting my instincts.

Then cancer came too, which I faced in my very rational way while she suffered from the outside, waiting and unable to do anything. The same cancer happened to both of us in completely different ways.

This does not mean every day was good, easy, or beautiful. Of course it was not. Twenty years are not made of one big declaration, they are made of the decision to keep talking, staying, and choosing again, including on the days when it would be easier not to do any of it.

And this year Lucas came into our lives, so this count that started with the two of us now also counts the first days of our new family.

When I asked Lu to be my girlfriend, I told her father that I was going to marry her. I was not asking permission and I was not joking.

I was right.

Lu, thank you for these 7,305 days. I love you and I would choose all of them again, including the difficult ones, because they brought us here.

Now let's keep counting ❤️