She stood on the gravel under the Ferris wheel, the colored lights reflecting in her hair. Above her, couples held hands in the buckets, kissed much closer to the sky. She had just enough tickets in her pocket for a single ride.

For a moment, she looked up at the swaying cars, overwhelmed by the motion, the smell of funnel cake, the bead of sweat rolling down her spine, the thumping of the bass from the faster ride across the way.

The assumptions and announcements dropped in from a distant country, so innocuous it was easy to ignore the subtext.

Out in the sun, I rolled up my sleeves to bare my shoulders, absorbed warmth against the chill. A cup of green tea, a new freckle or two, a moment to remember each mile I traveled to get here. I left any response I might have given somewhere out on the highway. In the golden light of afternoon, there was nothing to say.

They masked deeper troubles with clinking glasses and noisy dinners. Every night, another friend over. Dinner, plated. Wine bottles, opened. Every night, the dishwasher humming just before they turned in.

In the morning, the glasses sparkled, but their eyes glazed as they wandered the kitchen, the rhythm of their hosting interrupted by sleep. They did not want to know each other, anymore, in bathrobes, with coffee.

He found her crying outside her apartment door.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I lost my key.”

He would have kissed her then, but he just put his arms around her. They were neighbors, he thought. There would be other opportunities.

Her kitchen is full of mistakes tonight—salt where there should be sugar, not an uncracked egg to be found, a hair resting on the surface of the soup.

She was more careful, once, with her measurements, with her ingredients, with her mise en place. But tonight, she went from too cautious to not cautious enough, and her dinner has turned bitter in her mouth.

Thin ice tightropes are my specialty, all slim-slippery, all risky-deadly, but magical when my footing holds and it all works out.

I am bruised, yes. But I know what it feels like to make it across.

Scratch that.

I hope, someday, I’ll know.

“Marriage is work,” people will offer, unsolicited, their advice plucked from their own lives, their love or lack of it, their own story.

But, marriage can be words juxtaposed in a way no one thought of before, the surprise turn inside a jazz phrase, a life built so creatively that two become more beautiful, more whole, as one.

Even moments of dissonance cannot quell the optimism of a song sung, low and sweet, in the ear under a cathedral ceiling. That is your story. That is your melody, resolving joyfully, resolving with the notes that both of you know by heart.

*For Roger and Michelle, on their wedding day