We started planning five years ago. She asked two years before that. It took a year to tell my parents, and another six months for them to come around. If they could accept us it couldn't take long for the rest of the world to catch up, that's what we thought.

She asked on a Tuesday. I thought it was a strange day for something so special. Tuesday was such a nothing day. Not hated, not loved, just there. She told me later that she'd planned for that weekend but she hadn't been able to wait.

We were sitting in the living room of the house we shared with two other couples. We had the house to ourselves, I can't remember why. We weren't alone in that house very often but we were that night for reasons that don't seem worth remembering.

She was fidgeting. That wasn't unusual. She was always fidgeting, I had long since accepted it as one of her only flaws. Still I had a limit, and that night was beyond the accepted level of fidgeting for anyone, even someone as in love as I was. She was fidgeting and she wasn't catching onto any of my non confrontational attempts to calm her down so I had no choice but to say something.

I remember being worried, about upsetting her. The seven years since have got us to the point that I would never be worried about bringing up something so simple. I know, without a doubt, when she fidgets too much she's got something she needs to tell me. But at the time everything was new, although it felt like we'd been together forever.

The exact words are gone, but I know I said something that prompted her to blurt out a question that probably usually requires more thought. She would have liked to have thought about it more, I think. I liked her blurting.

"Will you marry me?" she said. The words all strung together like a line of washing when you have to share pegs. It took a moment for my comprehension skills to kick in and that moment looked like a lifetime on her face. I think she aged seven years in the time it took me to formulate a response, and she aged even more when my response was not what she was expecting.

I don't know if she knew I was going to say yes. I like to think she did, but I'm sure there was a tiny bit of doubt hidden under the excitement and anticipation. Three years after that Tuesday in the living room, she admitted that she'd spent a lot of time figuring out what she'd say if I declined. It was all planned out, until I laughed. She had not planned for that.

It felt like a perfectly reasonable response at the time. That might sound unbelievable, and the benefit of hindsight makes it clear that laughter is definitely not the proper response when someone proposes to you but it just seemed so funny. She didn't find it funny, but that's because I had a piece of information she did not.

Somewhere, between blurting the question and my laughter she had pulled a ring out of her pocket and slid off the couch to kneel on the ground in front of me. That random Tuesday had in a moment gone from nothing to everything.

The ring is old, white gold, with a line of sapphires running along the top. It's not the ring I had imagined, it was better because it was what she picked for me.

She'd been keeping the ring in her pocket for a week. She couldn't let it go, she said. Couldn't leave the room without it, she said. She probably knew she wasn't going to make it to the fancy Saturday evening she had planned, she's hopeless at keeping secrets, so she carried it in her pocket. Just in case.

When I heard her question, I didn't understand. It's not a question I was used to hearing, it was new and it came from nowhere on a random Tuesday evening. But when I saw the ring, I understood. The ring made sense. The ring sent my mind into overdrive, setting off an unconscious reaction that resulted in my laughing and running from the room in response to a proposal.

I don't know what she thought when that happened, not really. She told me she was okay, that she was in shock and hadn't really had a chance to work through what had happened before I returned. I reckon I screwed up a little though, she's nice about it and it's since become a cute story we tell people when they ask how it happened. At the time, I think maybe I broke her heart for a moment and I hate myself for that.

It was only a moment, or maybe a couple of moments. It wasn't more than that. I ran from the room as fast as I could, from the house, to the garage. That's where I had hidden it. In box at the bottom of a box on the bottom of a pile of boxes in the corner of a garage that was full of boxes. It wasn't the most convenient location, but I wanted it safe. More importantly I wanted it away from temptation so I didn't do something stupid like blurt out the question in the living room on a random Tuesday.

It's possible it took more than a couple of moments for me to get to the box I had hidden it in, but it all happened so fast in my head. It was the opposite of the way your mind slows down when you have a car accident. Everything was going at double speed, I felt like The Flash. I rushed back into the living room clutching the box in my hand like a prize.

She wasn't kneeling on the floor when I got back. She had sort of fallen back onto her bum so she was sitting on the floor starring at the ring she held in her hand as if there was an answer hidden in the sapphires. It was only when I saw the confusion written all over her face like a neon sign that I realised I hadn't actually answered her question.

As stupid as it sounds seven years later, at the time, in the moment, I thought the answer was obvious. I didn't say it because it seemed like my feelings were out there written all over my face, my body, my existence. It didn't need to be said because the answer was always going to be yes. Unfortunately she couldn't read what I felt was written on my skin, so the only thing she had to go on was me laughing and running from the room. I'll admit it didn't look good.

The moment I saw the tears starring to well in her eyes I forgot everything. I threw myself on the floor in front of her holding the box I had run to collect out to her like an offering to a malicious deity.

She took the box as she started crying, each tear dripping down her cheek felt like a punch to the gut. I wanted to cry and I wanted to laugh, because I knew something she didn't know, I had all the answers and she had none. I knew what was about to happen would turn sad tears happy, but that didn't mean it hurt any less to watch them fall.

I don't think she was really thinking as she opened that box. I think she was looking for an escape, trying to ignore the crack appearing on her heart, but I watched the recognition roll across her face. She looked at the delicate diamond set into a simple gold band and she did the only reasonable thing. She laughed.

We laughed. Together. On the floor of our living room. On a random Tuesday evening. Tears streaming as we both clutched the rings in our hands. It was the best moment of my life.

Eventually through tears and laughter she pointed out that I hadn't yet answered her question, or asked my own. She asked again, pushing the ring on my finger as I replied "only if you marry me too." It was a moment so fully and completely joyful that everything else disappeared and all that mattered was that she asked and I said yes.

The next day, the rose coloured haze of joy had dissipated into reality and we both remembered that there were a number of obstacles in the way of our wedded bliss. The fact that it wasn't legal, at the time, didn't feel as pertinent as the fact that my parents didn't know I was in a relationship. That was the biggest cloud looming over our future, until we dealt with that everything else was irrelevant.

Six months. That's how long it took. Six months of arguments, and tears, and fear. All bursting out of me and blasting a hole in our relationship. She was supportive, always so supportive but as the months passed by she got frustrated. I got frustrated. We both got frustrated with each other. It was never enough to break us completely but we were strained and stretched to the limit.

I didn't want to tell them but I did because it was important for her, it was important for us. We couldn't move forward until we passed the first hurdle. Until we made the first jump. I didn't want to tell them because I knew how they'd react.

I wanted to be wrong but I wasn't.

They asked me to leave the moment I told them and they didn't speak to me for a month. I cried in her arms on the floor of the living room where we had experienced so much joy only months before.

A month after I told them, my mother called and acted as though nothing was wrong and the first phone call I let her. I let her pretend everything was fine. I let her pretend she hadn't broken my heart worse than any girl I'd ever dated.

The second time she called, I didn't let her and she hung up.

The third time my mother asked how she was. It wasn't much, but it made me weep with happiness.

Three months after I told them all four of us finally met for coffee. It was tense and awkward and my father couldn't figure out where to look, his eyes darting around like he was having some kind of seizure. We laughed about it all the way home, it was the only way to deal with the absurdity of my father almost choking on his coffee when he saw my hand in hers. They were trying and that felt like everything.

A year after she asked, and I asked, and we both said yes, my mother offered to throw us an engagement party. We didn't tell her we'd already had one, a couple of weeks after it happen. We didn't tell her she wasn't invited. I didn't tell her I was glad she hadn't been there.

We let her plan the party. It was important to her. She was trying. That was important to us.

The party was not fun. It was filled with people that looked at us like we were an exhibit at the zoo. But after a few too many glasses of wine I heard my mother complaining about the fact that the government hadn't made it legal yet. She was talking like she'd always felt that way, like six months before she wouldn't have been on the other side of the argument, but I let her have it. She was defending us and it was nice. I went home to visit more often after that.

Almost two years after she asked we bought a house. It was tiny and old and more than we could afford but it was home. The first night we spent in our house was the first time we seriously started planning for something that wasn't yet legal. It was too much cider and searching venues we could never afford, but it was the beginnings of a plan. The beginnings of a need. The beginnings of the future.

I loved that house. Loved living in it. Loved fixing it up. Loved every single broken thing about it. Most of all I loved the hope that lived in that house. We really thought it was going to happen when we lived in that house. We really began to make a plan.

One night of expensive wedding venues, led to genuine questions. We started saving, even though my parents insisted they would pay but we didn't want to rely. They were doing much better, they were much more accepting, but we still didn't trust them. I still didn't trust them. And her parents wouldn't pay for anything, they didn't even acknowledge they had a daughter.

The longer we waited, the more money we saved. We didn't go on holidays, we didn't go on nights out, we didn't go anywhere. We were saving for something and that's what we pinned all our hopes on. We thought things would change, we expected things to change. Any day now, that's what we'd tell each other as we pulled out the folder we kept our plans in. Any day now, everything would change.

Any day became any week became any month became any year. Eventually something that had seemed inevitable became impossible.

We were in limbo. In the same way we had been when she had been waiting for me to tell my parents, but we didn't have a say. This wasn't a problem I cold solve with a phone call. It wasn't a problem either of us could solve. We were stuck in the waiting room for equality and we couldn't figure out whether we should try for another train.

Mostly we ignored it. We pretended it was nothing more than an annoying blip in our otherwise perfect plans. Laughed about having a bag packed and ready to go so we were ready the moment it happened. But it was a strain. It strained us. It hurt us. And there was one big issue we couldn't talk our way around.

Everything was fine, until we started talking about children. Then everything got complicated. The plan was, we'd wait. It was old fashioned and probably pointless but we wanted to wait. We weren't quite ready anyway, that's what we told ourselves anyway.

Then three years ago, we were ready. We were ready and we were sick of waiting. We had stopped putting money into the special account we opened and we started saving for something else, something new. Something amazing. Something we didn't need a piece of paper for. Something the government wasn't involved in.

She found out she was pregnant on a Tuesday, after months of trying. I stopped drinking in sympathy so we didn't have any champagne. We toasted with pink lemonade and I listen to her cry as she made me promise we'd be better than her parents. That we'd love our baby no matter what. We didn't talk about her parents much, it hurt and it didn't help but we talked about them a lot that Tuesday night drinking pink lemonades.

When Hunter was born on a Tuesday we decided it was officially the best day of the week. He was a week early, ready and willing to get into the world and into our lives. He was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, he still is. My mother cried and my father tried to buy me a cigar for some reason.

It became both more and less important after Hunter arrived. Everything was less important in a lot of ways because our time was so taken by him and everything that concerned him. At the same time something that had been a personal desire became something more. We wanted Hunter to grow up in a better world than we did. We stopped waiting and started fighting, when we had time.

As the car hit us I wondered if we had fought hard enough. We were waiting, but we had time. It felt like we had time. We were waiting, we were fighting, but we never doubted it would happen eventually. Eventually was taking longer than we could have known on that random Tuesday seven years ago but it was still inevitable.

It was not inevitable and now it might never happen.

I'm waiting again and in a way I'm still waiting for the same thing. I'm still waiting to find out whether I will be able to marry the love of my life. I'm in a waiting room waiting to find out whether I we will be able to wait forever or if I have missed my chance.

The car hit and I was okay. The car hit and Hunter was okay. The car hit and she was not okay. Everything was not okay.

As I wait, I can't stop thinking. About all the plans we made, about all the dreams we had, dreams that may never be a reality even if she comes through the surgery. Even if she makes a full recovery.

I can't stop watching the door. Waiting for her parents to arrive. They don't know she's here, but they could. On dark nights, when we expected the worst, we used to talk about it. Talk about how they could take her away from me. Talk about how they could try to take Hunter. That might happen, it might night. I don't know and the uncertainty is ripping me apart.

There's no answer, there's no ending, there's no knowing. We were stuck forever waiting for an answer that may never come and now I'm waiting alone.