I hear your heart beat to the beat of the drums

For our tenth anniversary, rushthatspeaks and I got married.

At the start of the year, we had intended it to be a somewhat more communal affair, but as the narrowing parameters of the pandemic made that increasingly unlikely, we decided the things that mattered most were ourselves, the day, and the sea. As the day rained solidly toward evening, spatch scouted us an assortment of beaches with pavilions, but we ended up finding our way to Winter Island in Salem, where the rain had mostly blown off into sea-mist and the automatic flash of the Fort Pickering Light. The tide was low and there were granite steps down to the shingle, which was full of dark and pale seaweeds and mussels and slipper shells; we could touch the sea where it ran in over the cobbles and sand and stand at its edge in the streetlight from the jetty and the red-lit office with the open door that we guessed belonged to the harbormaster, whom we did not bother and who did not bother us. I asked if they would marry me. They said always. They asked if I would marry them. I said I would. Instead of jewelry, we exchanged barnacle shells that had turned up like four-leaf clovers in the shore-litter, fingernail-sized, pierced through like rings. We held each other and smiled a lot in the salt night. I had not kissed my lover—my fiancé—in seven months. I hope to do a lot more of it.

We drove home by way of Salem Willows and Devereux Beach in Marblehead. The rain had stopped and there were constellations visible through the clouds. We will celebrate soon with takeout from SRV and whenever it is safe with the friends and family our government's handling of this plague kept us from tonight. I feel we must be impoverished and chronically ill enough to qualify for a cholera wedding, but Rush thinks we might know one another too well for the ritual to work. No matter what, we reached this year.

Many, many more, my sea-witnessed husband.