08.20.12

when our little cat died in front of us a few summers ago, joe and i spent the afternoon dazed and drifting around the city, beaching ourselves at meaningless corners and patches of grass like sea creatures with inner-ear damage. you're married, i thought, when you hold something down together and you kill it. months after that, when our friend judd called to tell us we would be allowed at last to buy our apartment and i cried with relief at my desk, you're married, i thought, when you turn yourselves inside out for your home.

our dear friends lesley and cody were married at a storied old chorizo factory in the village last month. the building's core had been reimagined as an atrium, and light from the glass roof filtered all the way down to where they stood together on the first floor. we gathered with the other guests at the rails of the great staircase-whorls above them, the steps and landings following the walls like the chambers of a nautilus. loving cody, lesley explained to him, was something she couldn't not do; it was breathing. you're married, i thought.

i don't know that my relationship - or any relationship - is especially instructive; each pair is its own species, i think, and things we find toxic are quite nourishing for others (and vice versa, i'm sure). i do know that the thirteen shitty, wondrous, improbable years since joe and i met in a garden in oxford have been the best of my life, and that as i married him - six years ago today - i became myself. that's all.