Kenady & Patrick — On the coast

To Kenady and Patrick —

The morning was the wedding too.

I keep coming back to the frame of your mother fastening the back of your dress. The light through the window. The plant on the sill. Her hands knowing what to do — and your shoulders, knowing too. There are entire wedding albums that pretend the day begins at the ceremony. Yours didn't. Yours began in that room.

By the time we got to the cliff, the day had earned itself. White chairs in a half-circle, the Pacific doing its long slow thing behind them, two of you saying words that you'd been working up to in your separate ways for a long time.

I am grateful to have stood there with a camera. Thank you for letting me.

— Stephanie