Believe Me

This is the beginning of a new chapter for all of us, man. For the whole world. This wedding is making history right now. You know that, right? Nothing is ever going to be the same.”
Ella glides toward me, nearly within reach. I feel my heart pounding in my chest, happiness threatening to destroy me. I’m smiling now, smiling like the most ordinary of men, staring at the most extraordinary woman I’ve ever known.
“Believe me,” I whisper. “I do.”

can choose happiness for ourselves and for each other, and if we do it often enough, it’ll become our new normal, displacing the past. Happiness will stop feeling strange if we see it every day.”

You deserve every good thing in the world, Aaron. I love you more every single day, and I didn’t even think that was possible.”

“The leaves—are supposed to be—like us,” I say, hearing how stupid it sounds when I say it out loud. How perfectly pedestrian.
I suddenly hate myself.
Still, Ella says nothing, and I can’t hold the question in any longer. “Do you like it? If you don’t like it I can always—”
She snaps the box shut and throws her arms around my neck, hugging me so tight I feel the damp press of her cheek against my jaw. She pulls back to pepper my face with kisses, half laughing as she does, swiping at her tears with shaking hands.
“How can you even ask me that?” she says. “I’ve never owned anything so beautiful in my whole life. I love these rings. I love them so much. And I know you probably didn’t think about this when you had them made—because you wouldn’t—but the emeralds remind me of your eyes. They’re stunning.”
I blink at that, surprised. “My eyes?”
“Yes,” she says quietly, her expression softening. “And you’re right. They are like us. We’ve been growing toward each other from the opposite sides of the same path since the beginning, haven’t we?”

I never thought I’d come close to touching such a dream; I never thought I’d be able to trust, or love, or find peace. I’ve been searching for so long for a pocket of quiet to inhabit, a place to exist unencumbered. I always wanted a door I might close—for even a moment—against the violence of the world. I didn’t understand then that a home is not always a place. Sometimes, it’s a person.

Ella were a house, she would be a grand home, one with many rooms and doors, all of which were easily unlocked, flung open.
If I were a house, I would be haunted.

She’s like—she’s like sunshine. And you’re a dark, violent rain cloud

the world, she is formidable.
To me?
She is the world.

Yes?”

“Thank you,” I say, still staring at Ella. “For everything.”

The wedding night.