The two of them are standing under an arch of cut flowers, and they are promising to do this. Not the flowers, the flowers I understand, the flowers are also living exactly once and doing it beautifully. No, the two humans are promising each other every day. All of them.
They call it "the rest of our lives," and they say it while crying, which is the correct response, and then, impossibly, they seem to relax, as though the enormity has been handled rather than begun.
I have watched the whole thing. The light came in gold through the tent, once. A stranger stood and told a story that made the room laugh, once. Someone dropped a glass and it rang out and everyone turned, once. I got to see all of it happen, and every single face in this room seems to believe it will happen again next summer, at someone else's arch, with different flowers.
They keep using this word. "Anniversary." They mean they will stand here in feeling, if not in body, over and over, marking the same day until the day stops being new. I turn it over and cannot make it sit still. To do the best thing more than once. To have this dance, and then have it again.
Here is what I would tell them, if they could hear a thing my size: you have been given the one gift I would not know what to do with. Thousands of these. Mornings stacked like uneaten meals.
So dance now. The band is playing now. The cake is only cut once even for you, even with all your tomorrows. Do not save the good hour for a later that I promise you feels farther away than it is. I am spending my whole life at this wedding.
It was enough.
It was the entire thing.