Thoughts on Ellie B's wedding, except of course that's not really what they're thoughts about at all...

He’s not sleeping.

I know he’s not sleeping.

And now this: he can’t even flirt with me. I’m all dressed up, looking pretty good, though maybe not as, well, a m a z i n g as I have on other occasions. But surely looking good enough for him to flirt with me.

And he, might I say, still looks pretty good in a tux. I wonder who did his tie for him?

I miss the intimacy of that.

Let’s be real, here: I miss the flirting.

Which I know is wrong, because after the flirting I would end up at home eating ice cream and drinking wine and throwing things at my flatmate’s cat (oh, wait, no – that’s someone else) and more often than not – sobbing my heart out into my pillow, hoping my flatmate wouldn’t hear, because how pathetic is that? The little secretary’s unrequited crush on her handsome, driven, ambitious, intelligent boss. Ugh. I hate the cliché. Hate it.

Do I really want that? That daily heartbreak? The feeling pathetic?

No. Of course I don’t want that.

I don’t want that part of it. But I miss the flirting part. The part where just for a few minutes, a few seconds, a few hundredths of a second sometimes, I see in his eyes what I saw at Inauguration or at the Hospital or that snowy December 23rd. Well, that wasn’t his eyes. That was him almost giving himself away with his words. But I miss that part too.

Not the emotions that hit afterwards. I don’t miss those. I miss the kidding-myself-that-this-might-be-ever-going-somewhere seconds. I miss those moments when I’m almost sure I see my own feelings reflected in his beautiful eyes.

I miss our intimacy.

I miss looking after him. He’s not sleeping. I doubt a vegetable has crossed his line of sight, let alone his lips, in a good few months now.

He can’t even flirt with me.

I know, I k n o w what I said about the peppermint creams. But he’s not okay, and someone needs to look after him, and I want that to be me. Not just because I can’t bear the thought of that being anyone else, though I will freely(ish) admit that’s a large part of it. Just because...

Because...

Oh, for Pete's sake, Donna. Say it. It’s a diary. No one is ever going to read it. You need to face facts so you can deal with them.

Because looking after him is what I want to do for the rest of my life. And have him look after me.

And have him tell me I look amazing more than once every eight years.

Oh, good grief. How did I end up back at Square One? How?

Focus, girl. There’s an election in six weeks. And you really want to win this thing. Remember?

After, after the "interview" or whatever that was...

Well, to hell with him. I’ll show him. I’m not doing this for him, anyway. Not anymore. I’m doing it for us – not him and me us, there isn’t one of those, never has been, never will be, I mean us as in the Party, us as in the nation, because a Republican President is in nobody’s best interests. Well, nobody that I like anyway. Except perhaps Cliff.

So I’m doing it for the nation. And a little bit for me. Why, after all, can a campaign not be a place to reinvent yourself and heal? To find your confidence and start over? Why can’t it be those things?

Look how well that worked out last time round. Ha.

I’ve found my corner and I will work harder than I’ve ever worked in my life and I’ll show him – I mean, me, I’ll show me, because it’s not about him anymore. I’ll show me, like Maria von Trapp, I have confidence that spring will come again... besides which you see I have confidence in me. So there.

Ahem. Whatever. I think I need to get some sleep now.

Ten years on from In Excelsis Deo: looks like we made it...

Ten years.

Can you believe it’s been ten years?

I can when I look at the photos of me, of us, from those days. Me so fresh faced. Josh with so much, well, so much hair. And perhaps a few fewer shadows under his eyes and wrinkly lines on his forehead. Those wrinkly lines I love, but still...

The book sits on a shelf higher than any potential damage that could come to it and sometimes when he’s late home from work or when the East and West Wings have worked well together or, more often, when they haven’t and I need to remind myself what it means for him and me to be a team, I pull it down and I read it, over and over again. And it never fails: pride and joy and pain knot together in my stomach until they are all overwhelmed with my love for him, with his for me.

Pain? Yes. Because man, those years. Loving someone that much and having to live in denial? Every day? Working just a kissing distance away from him? For nine years? Seriously. You try it sometime. It’s not a lot of fun.

But pride and joy. So much of those. I wouldn’t trade the memories of those for anything.

You are, quite simply, indispensable.

I know it’s a cliché, and I know Sam taught him to hate those, but my heart leapt when I read that. Did a little somersault right there inside me in the bullpen in the West Wing in the White House. Somewhere in those powerful halls was a fresh-faced blonde who felt for one moment that she was more than just a cog. That somehow she was holding the whole thing together, or at least holding together the man who helped to hold it all together.

Right there and then I knew. I knew: I want to work with this man for the rest of my life. Not as his assistant – as his partner – eventually. Right there and then I decided: my dream is to learn as much as I can from him, and to become all I can be, and to continue to work with him, on an equal footing. But it was him who drew me there. Him and his all-encompassing passion to make the world a better place. As he also wrote, we make a great team. Now that we’re more like equals than ever, it’s still true.

It took me a while to realise that I wanted more than just a work partnership; to understand why when I dreamed of children way out there in the future they always seemed to have fluffy hair and dimples and Jewish-sounding names.

It took that awful night at Rosslyn for me to realise not only the depth of my feelings for him but also the nature of them. This man was no big brother; not even just an attractive boss I had a slight crush on or a soft spot for. This man was HIM. You know, like in the song, “I’ve found the one I waited for... Gonna love you till the seas run dry...” I’d found him and I’d almost lost him, all at the same time, and it was all too much, and I don’t know how I stayed in one piece that night and the nights that followed. Looking after him held me together in a weird way, though every step of it was painful and I still feel sick when I think about it.

That was nine years ago. And he’s still the one I run to. The one I want for life.

Looks like we made it. Look how far we’ve come...

Mission Accomplished

Well, I did.

I did have a good teacher.

And not just in politics. I’m getting better at those one-line put-downs. Delivered with a smile, but chilling for the other guy. Is it wrong that I'm kind of proud of that? Proud of my own imperviousness, my own resilience?

And man, am I proud of myself for being able, for finding it in myself, to do that to Josh.

Because it means – it must mean, mustn't it? – that I’m finally moving on.

I left to find myself.

Mission accomplished.

I left to find out who I was apart from him. To see whether I could learn, could grow, could be more, do more.

To see, too, whether I would ever be able to prise my heart back from him.

Mission accomplished.

I just wish there wasn’t a tiny part of me that was so ashamed for finding it in myself to do that to Josh.