“Grow old along with me…the best is yet to be…”

We begin this new chapter of our lives with an invitation, not a promise. In turn we speak Browning’s lines, hand in hand, and the wedding barn brims with expectancy like eyes ready to overflow.

No choir, no singer, just seven minutes of silence to mark time and hold it open.

“I’ve never seen you cry until now,” I realise.

Outside clouds part; saffron-coloured prayer flags burnish the courtyard like a blessing. Already twelve years in, now the law has caught up with us, and here we are, riding the first wave of civil partnerships. For a moment then, designing ceremonies and rethinking rituals felt like a gift.

So first the signing, now the silence.

Six minutes. No tick, no tock. Breath soft and lives lived.

I don’t know if I believe in love at first sight. But I do know what it is like to see someone again for the first time. Recognition at first sight, perhaps. Babies we were, freshers far flung across 8,000 miles, in an obscure red brick British university. Hall mates, class mates, best mates. You were making the girls cackle as you rolled about on a leather sofa in the common room, and I didn’t care to disguise my gaze.

Three.

“Someone else is crying,” I hear, as the sniffles begin.

“Some things don’t match, but they go together”, it occurs to me that this is not only a good mantra for the 90s style in which we first fashioned our courtship, but also a fitting way to reason the mixed heritage, same sex couple currently being held by ninety silent guests. Sometimes breathing is all the witness you need.

One minute left?

We have fallen into a place where everything is silence, and everything is music. There may be one minute or one lifetime, or many, still for this. And then, from the expectancy, the piano and now “Ombra mai fu…” entering the silence and yet not really breaking it.

The sun sets the flags aflame. We step blinking into the open, and, each taking up a saffron willow prayer, we walk quietly into the woods.