Today, I had a really bad, terrible, razor-bladey and boiling blood rage kind of day. Not even a little bit good. Well, OK, there was a little bit. But mostly, the day just left me feeling alone, a bit incompetent, and almost like a loser at life. Gross feelings.

On top of all of the gross feelings, I got a little bit mad at my husband tonight, too. While we were on the phone, he said, “I still love you” and that made me mad, because “still” means “even though you can be a real shit sometimes.” And I can. And I was.

But tonight, he kept me on the phone until I was giggling instead of crying. He made me go outside and he steered me around the sky, naming stars and planets as I turned and bent my head back.

When we first started dating, it was February. He used to take me to his favorite star-gazing spot on a hill near a waterfall in the city. It was freezing and I had this giant, crazy, fake-fur lined camel colored coat. He would stand behind me and put his hands on the sleeves of my coat, rotating and baby-stepping around with me until he had me right where he could point up at a star and name it. He would put his head almost on my shoulder and look up with me. He pointed me toward planets, stars, nebulae, galaxies. There was a total lunar eclipse just a few weeks after we started dating, and we watched it at the same time, each of us holding a phone to our ear in our own houses, saying “wow” what felt like every couple of breaths.

Tonight, while we were on the phone, he navigated me toward what looked like a perfect equilateral triangle low in the western sky. He guessed, correctly, that two of the points were planets. Without my husband’s influence, I might have seen that triangle and said, “cool, those stars make a triangle.” Not, “wow…Saturn and Mars!”

And that’s what I owe my husband. He has enriched my life in many ways. He has opened up new horizons, new adventures, new possibilities. If I had not met this man, I might never have known I was looking at planets instead of stars.