Words and Concoctions: A Coffee-inspired Wedding: Bag of Beans: the Magic then as it is NOW...(lovey-dovey prose/anecdote/story due every September)

365 (er, 367 as of this writing) days ago, we never got to take a picture of ourselves enjoying an incredibly fine meal at Bag of Beans, Tagaytay. "Enjoying," of course, did not comprise eating or drinking, as neither of us really sat down to slice and dice our way across robust slabs of steak and pork, or to whet our appetites with the creamiest pumpkin soups. About 15 minutes into our dinner, the food served had considerably cooled down, and I'd only munched down on about a third of my meal; Kat, about a fourth. But who cared? It was our first dinner together, and, to be more dramatic, the first time our constellations coalesced and pretty much dipped into a galactic vat of the sweetest dreams ever conjured.

The food must have cost a thousand, and we must've only eaten through less than half of it. That was the best part. The economics of love, as they say, isn't one to be bound by rationality; but the returns are indelible as they are delightful, or to take delight in. They exceed whatever zero-sum, pareto-optimal semantic you can throw at me. And for me, the returns traced down the effervescence of Kat's beautiful face, which shone, laughed, and shimmered against the gentle tides of the evening. In rhythm, my heart - amid its congenital murmur - beat with hers, as did my every gesture, gaze and breath.

And had I been cavalier enough, I would've held her hand in the brewing opaqueness of the evening, and told her legendary stuff.

But there was no need for a fairy-tale ending; I felt that pixie-dust, guised as thick Tagaytay fog at 10pm, had already suffused the night and taken over/enhanced our fixations. The fog, fittingly, brought us to a nearby Starbucks for usual musings and helpings of frappuccino and chocolate. (I say "fittingly" because thats how we would, in the months that would follow, style both the convention and splendidness of our coupling.) The night drifted. And drifted. And drifted. It drifted as much as love brewed between two listless, amazing souls. It drifted inasmuch that she could no longer allow night to crossover to dawn. Because I'd spent the past hours basking in the caffeinated bliss of her company, intruding her stories with an artillery of glib and gab, and finding a neverland chapter in her real life storybook, that I couldn't imagine being anywhere else, or with anyone else, at that precise moment of earth's history. Only with her, Kat.

I'd tell the world, despite its perennial immediacy and endless, tireless list of must-to-do's: "I have to go about seeing a girl." (If you'd seen Goodwill Hunting, you'd know this).

And that's what I keep telling the world still, 12 months after, after having just commemorated that first evening in Bag of Beans: I got to go about this girl.

I got to be with my woman. My fiancee, now.

And in another 365 days, or so: My wife.

Absolutely Fitting.