We bought a car, found the apartment in Astoria, and somewhere in there we walked around the fire and made it all official. The day itself has its own act. What I remember is everything around it. Thailand right after was one of the best weeks of my life. Then our first Diwali, lit on a rented kitchen counter, and a first Thanksgiving with a table laid for eight in an apartment designed for two. We spent that whole year at other people’s weddings, and the rest of it enjoying our own first year married.

Most of this married year was dust and building. We spent it on a house we lived in and fixed up, standing in half-built rooms that weren’t ready. We left our first apartment and enjoyed that last night with the air mattress in the living room. Eventually we packed up and got our Syosset home ready. And for our first anniversary we put on good clothes and went into the city, one year married, to a table by a window. By the end of it we were ready to start building in our new, completed home.

The year we started adding. We drove up for Jaxon, and at a gas station on the way you stood holding an empty collar in a hat that said BEST DAY EVER, before he was ours. Later we went to Europe, and our second anniversary turned out to fall in Paris. The next morning we had the courtyard of the Louvre for pictures, early enough that nobody else was in it. You planned it perfectly, to make sure we could immortalize that memory. Let’s also not forget the great trip out west to California. 2018 was a lot of us just enjoying us, before the big additions still to come.

We spent this year getting a house ready for someone who hadn’t arrived yet — the room, the lists, the careful ordinary weekends, even the babymoon. It was us getting ready and enjoying every second. I remember almost nothing else about that year, and I have decided that is the point.