For your eyes, and now yours

Love letters

Two letters, written on the first anniversary of our engagement and sealed until now.

From Simaneka · to Nakeba

To my Nakeba

6 September 2026

My Maria,

I have tried to write this letter eleven times. Engineers are supposed to be good at calculations, but I still cannot work out how I got this lucky.

You make every ordinary day feel like the first hour in that café — the rain outside, the coffee going cold, the feeling that there is nowhere else in the world I would rather be. You taught me to slow down, to notice the small yellow flowers on the side of the road, to stop the car.

I promise to keep stopping the car. I promise to be on time — at least on the twentieth of March. I promise to hold your hand on every dune, every mountain and every hard day, and to keep choosing you, again and again, for the rest of my life.

I'll see you at the end of the aisle.

Forever yours, Daniel

From Nakeba · to Simaneka

To my Simaneka

6 September 2026

Dearest Daniel,

Do you remember the cheese board? I think about it more than you'd like. You looked so devastated, and then you started laughing too, and I remember thinking: this is a man who can lose everything off the plate and still make the afternoon wonderful.

You build bridges for a living, and you have built one to me — patiently, quietly, strong enough to carry everything we are bringing with us. Your family, who welcomed me before I could pronounce half their names. My family, who adore you more than they adore me (they've told me). Our notebook of places, still only half ticked off.

I can't wait to fill the rest of it with you. All of it. The dunes and the oceans and the ordinary Tuesdays.

See you under the oaks, my love.

All my love, Maria

Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds.

William Shakespeare Sonnet 116