Ships that pass in the night.

We have all heard or read that idiom time and time again. Certain phrases drift around us so often that the words become like vapor in the air — absorbed without a second thought, like breath, like ritual.

Ships that pass in the night.

Just words. Hollow. Weightless.

Until they weren't.

Because we were ships passing in the night — gliding through the same dark waters, tracing unseen orbits around one another. Night after night, for a year.

Convention has never been our nature, so it's only fitting that even our meeting was not written by design, but by serendipity — two souls stitched together by chance and chaos like constellations colliding, like verses scrawled in the margins of a forgotten book. We met where the map had no lines, where time folded in on itself, where logic loosened its grip, where the heart spoke a language only the two of us could understand.

I remember the intoxicating rush — fingers entwined as we wandered through Kiwanis Park beneath a sky heavy with stars. The thrill of chasing melodies in dim-lit record shops, hands brushing over cracked vinyl sleeves, searching for something neither of us could name. The quiet alchemy of hearing you weave sound for the first time, transmuting silence into rhythm, air into music. And the electric hush of our first night together, hearts thrumming in tandem, an unspoken promise already forming between us.

Love unfolded in the wonder of discovery — unexpected, uncharted, inevitable.

Like Dorothy upon the yellow brick road to meet the wizard, I too was graced by the magic of ruby slippers, with a promise of home. Not one of mere walls, nor brick, nor stone, but a home built within us, woven from quiet devotion, unshaken trust, and the gravity that keeps us in each other's orbit. In the hush between heartbeats, we have become more ourselves, more sensitive, more attuned, more luminous— shining as the brightest star in the inky night sky for one another, as the pointer stars to Polaris, always guiding each other back to center, never losing sight of what matters most.

Now, as we stand at the precipice of history, where the very right to love freely is questioned — where marriage equality for queer people, even interracial couples, in some places, teeters on the edge of becoming another relic of the past — we do not waver. We press forward, hand in hand, toward a future brimming with promise, guided by enduring faith that the love we share is not fleeting, but luminous, boundless, eternal.

Within us burns a light, a star that no darkness in the vast universe can dim. We invite those we love — and those who love us — to gather in celebration of this enduring light.