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...