Tenth Anniversary

All photos by Red Photo Co.

It all goes by so quickly. One day, you’re eighteen, working your first retail job, and you walk into a meeting expecting to see a room full of familiar faces. But there is a single stranger among them, someone new, and your little world shifts on its axis. You don’t know why, but you feel it happen.

At first it’s just a casual chat once in a while. But then it’s getting a cup of coffee after work. A first date. A month goes by and you wonder, can this really last? You’re both so young, after all. When a year passes, you wonder the same thing. You celebrate the anniversary. But you keep living your own life, pack your bags for the cross country move you were already planning – and he packs his to come with you. There is a rented apartment you can barely afford, exactly as many pieces of furniture as you need to survive, nothing more. Graduation. Moving across the country again. And then to Europe. By the time you come back, you’re wearing an engagement ring.

You’ve stopped asking yourself if it can really last, because you can’t imagine your life any other way.

So of course you marry him. It’s September fifth, a long weekend Sunday in 2010. The wedding is bigger and less intimate than you imagined. It is a celebration for others more than for you, because you are still so young and you’ve never done this before, that’s the idea, so you don’t know any better. You spend most of it running around to thank people you don’t recognise and will likely never meet again for coming, so that many of your memories are blurred, even just days later. The best part is getting in the taxi to drive away, finally being alone together to breathe. And then at the hotel, swapping the fancy clothes for sweatpants and devouring a room service cheese plate.

In retrospect, it isn’t the way you would celebrate your commitment, if you were doing it over. But you wouldn’t change it, either, because you know now that the moments in life that don’t go as planned make the best stories to retell later. You do retell those stories often, laughing. Usually with a glass of wine and a side of potato chips, wondering what on earth you were thinking.

…because you wouldn’t change each other, even though one of you puts all of their dirty dishes just two feet from the dishwasher instead of in it. Even though the other one flatly refuses to wash any dishes that the dishwasher can’t take care of. Even though neither one of you can sing but you both stubbornly insist on doing it anyway, often loudly. And even though, a decade and a half since you first met at work, your respective professions mean that you often see each other for just ten minutes a day.

It all goes by so quickly. Birthdays, moves, new jobs, holidays. And especially those ten minutes. Almost without you noticing, really. One day, you’re thirty-four, a corporate operations manager working from home during a global pandemic. And you wake up every morning next to the same person, still glad to see them. They are an inextricable part of your little world now. In just a few days, you’ll celebrate your tenth wedding anniversary, a little more than sixteen years after you first met. It won’t go as planned – there was supposed to be a trip to Spain – but you know that the moments in life that don’t go as planned make the best stories to retall later.

The story of our tenth anniversary will, I suspect, become one of them.

Happy tenth anniversary, my love. I can’t imagine my life any other way.