Day Twenty-Five
Describe your perfect husband/wife?

When I was a little girl, my Mum used to tell me that there is no way to describe the man who you will one day want to marry; that never in your wildest of dreams will you be able to imagine a person so truly matching your heart, so utterly perfect in every way, so infuriatingly right for you as the person who will become your husband.

But, as I got older – as I learnt more of life, and less of fairytales, I stopped believing in what my Mum had always told me of love. Back then I was adamant in my belief that I knew exactly what sort of man I wanted to marry; from his deep brown eyes to his rock star career, I had everything planned out.

And then I really grew up, perhaps all too quickly, and the foolish dreams of a teenaged Katie Beckett disappeared with everything else that I had once known.
For a long time I didn't believe that I would ever get married - I had seen for myself what love can do to us; what it had done to my Dad, and I didn't ever want to feel the crushing despair that I know he will always live with.
Then I began to think that maybe marriage wasn't as terrible as my mind had been making out, that perhaps the only way to heal was through love, to face the thing that I feared the most. And I did, in some small and incomplete way, begin to open myself up to the idea, to the thought that there was a man out there in the big, wide world made especially for me. But I chose the wrong men; good men, but good for somebody else, good in the ways that I knew would hurt me in the end.
At the time, I thought that I needed someone who lived a life identical to my own; that only through meeting an almost perfect copy of myself would I find happiness. I wanted someone who was more dedicated to their work than they were their personal lives, someone who would simply accept that they might not always be my first priority, someone scared and shy of love, someone who would always keep me pushed away. So much for 'opposites attract'; I was searching for my carbon copy.

Only now do I see how very right my Mum was, how every word of what she told me all those years ago is completely and utterly true.
We grow up under the illusion that we know our own hearts; that we are somehow magically able to predict the person who we are going to marry, that the world will align with our hearts and our minds and we will fall passionately into their arms as we pass them by on our way to work. And yet, when you do meet the right person; the only person that you can ever imagine spending your entire life with, the person for whom your heart was created, they are never at all who we expect them to be.
You can't describe your perfect husband or wife, you can't even imagine them, not until the day that you look into their eyes and see the love that you so ardently feel reflected beautifully within them, and then you know – not matter what – that you could never be truly happy with anybody else in this entire world.

I tell you this with the most sincere of honesty and belief in what I am writing; perhaps some people are able to predict the innermost desires of their hearts, but I don't think that to be the case.
Never would I have imagined my life with Castle; my ruggedly handsome, blue eyed writer with an imagination to rival that of most six year olds, a man so truly open to love, so accepting of all its forms and not afraid of a single one of them, my opposite in the very best of ways.
But, here I am, so wonderfully in love that sometimes I still have to remind myself that this hasn't all been a dream, and knowing wholeheartedly that Castle will, one day, be the man who I have the honour of marrying.

Love is unimaginable, uncontainable, and more often than not it is utterly unexpected. And they, I promise you, are the very things that make it so incredibly important to us.
We cannot plan who we fall in love with; we cannot scheme and conspire to find ourselves the perfect fit, but rather, we can only live in the hope that one day we will stumble upon the person who we were always supposed to love, the person who somehow manages to perfectly fill the missing pieces of our hearts.

To be continued..

I'm sorry, again, for the gaps between these updates - but school really is taking up every inch of my time at the moment.
I always planned to have this finished before the 24th, so keep a look out for a couple of updates on Saturday and Sunday :)

I hope that you are still enjoying the challenge days?
Thank you for reading,

Katie

P.S. Enquiries is still running (I have half of an answer currently written - and will be updating it at some point this week), but please do keep sending in any questions that you have for Beckett.
*If you are new to this story - please take a peek at Enquiries, it runs along this story as questions/answers between you - my ever lovely readers, and the Kate Beckett of my slightly AU world.*