No words

"The heart is hard to translate
It has a language of its own
It talks in tongues and quiet sighs
In prayers and proclamations 
In the grand days of great men and the smallest of gestures
In short shallow gasps...
All of my stumbling phrases never amounted to anything worth this feeling...
Words were never so useful
So I was screaming out a language that I never knew existed before"
- "All this and heaven too" by Florence and the Machine

Rolling my green suitcase beside me, I walked through the sliding glass doors. I spotted him immediately. He was standing behind the waist-high barrier in the international arrivals hall, waiting for me. He was wearing black dress pants and a blue button-down shirt, holding a bouquet of orange and red flowers. 

I quickened my pace as I crossed the linoleum floor. By the time I got to him, I was at risk of breaking into a jog. He opened his arms and wrapped them around me, the bouquet in his left hand colliding with my backpack. I could feel his scruffy beard against my cheek. I was home.

"I missed you," he said.

"Me too," I agreed, pulling back out of the hug to meet his deep blue eyes. "I'm really glad with where our relationship is right now."

"Actually, along those lines..." He took a step back from me and pulled a small black box out of his pocket. He dropped to one knee and looked up at me with sparkling blue eyes and a gleeful grin.

"Kirstin, will you marry me?"

I responded immediately with an enthusiastic yes, but I think there were plenty of exclamations and explicatives and a couple squeals in there too. Honestly, I don't remember. It was a bunch of nonsense. Some people in a nearby seating area cheered.

What I do remember clearly is being overcome. My right leg started shaking, with my heel tapping into the ground repeatedly at high speed. I could barely stand, and I could barely breathe. I felt like I was going to cry and run a marathon all at once. I was exhausted and overjoyed and...engaged.

The song written above has been on my mind ever since, cycling through my brain over and over. I just can't seem to get the lyrics out of my head, because Florence Welch captured exactly what my words cannot say. All of my stumbling phrases never amounted to anything worth this feeling. It has a language of its own. I am going to spend the rest of my life with my all-time favorite human, and there are no words to describe this.

One of Carl's relatives took this photo of us a few days later.