Every year on the day they’d first met — not their anniversary, the meeting itself, a distinction important to them both — they asked each other the same question: would you choose this again?
It had started half as a joke in the early, giddy years, when the answer was obviously, exuberantly yes. It had become more serious over time, through harder years, through a stretch when the answer required real thought before it arrived.
This year, fifteen years from the original meeting, they sat on the same bench in the same park where it had all started — a coincidence the first year, a tradition every year since.
“So,” Bashir said. “Would you choose this again?”
Layla considered the question properly, the way she always did now, refusing to let it become rote. She thought about the hard years — there had been some, real ones, the kind that tested something fundamental. She thought about the ordinary years, the quiet ones, the Tuesdays that made up most of any real life together. She thought about this year specifically, the small griefs and small joys of it.
“Yes,” she said. “Every time, yes. But not because it’s been easy.”
“Why, then?”
“Because choosing you has never once felt like settling. Even on the hardest days. It’s felt like the truest thing I do.”
He took her hand on the bench, the same bench, fifteen years older now themselves.
“Same question back,” she said.
“Yes,” he said simply. “I’d choose this again. I choose it every single day, actually. I just don’t always say it out loud.”
They sat a while longer as the evening came down around the park, two people who had learned that love isn’t a single decision made once, but a practice — repeated, examined, renewed — for as long as you’re lucky enough to keep doing it.
✦ Today’s Reflection
If you asked your partner today, “Would you choose this again?” — what would your honest answer be, and why?
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Sonia M. Rompoti, MSc, Bsc 
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