I Had a Birthday

This post is a little late, for those of you who've been keeping track of who posts what when. I actually am posting six days later than I wanted to, which is due to a lot of things ranging from the important to the mundane and from the serious to the oh-look-City-of-Heroes-has-a-Double-XP-Weekend-and-I've-got-a-level-45-tanker! (Who is now a level 50 tanker.) But somewhere in those thirteen days, I had a birthday. I am now thirty-six years old.

And when I first met Lady Ru'etha, I was twenty-five. It was sometime late in 2000 or early in 2001--neither of us can remember exactly which, and Yahoo's inbox unforgivably ate the email I had saved for years--and She sent me fanmail for one of my early stories. (We think it was "Simply Irresistible".) That led to exchanging mail, and that led to chats, and that led to plans to attend a con together before I even realized how deeply in love with Her I was.

I had my twenty-sixth birthday while eagerly anticipating my first face-to-face meeting with Her, the tenth anniversary of which will be in just over two weeks. By then, I already knew I wanted to be Hers, even if I didn't yet understand how deeply that ran and how much of my life I wanted to devote to Her. We have been friends and lovers and owners and owned for ten years, give or take a little bit of Internet time...and my thirty-sixth birthday was as much a celebration of that as it was of my getting another year older (and possibly wiser.) My birthday present was to lie down in Her arms and sleep, and I loved every second of it.

And my other birthday present was Penny Arcade Book Seven. That was pretty good too. :)