Warm · about a minute and a half · 208 words
Wedding Vows for a Long-Distance Couple (1.5 Minutes)
After four years living six time zones apart, Kenji wants vows that honor what the distance took without making the whole thing sound sad
Said by Kenji, to Siobhan. The names are made up.
The vows
Siobhan, for four years there was a second clock in my kitchen, set to Lisbon time. My friends thought it was a design choice. It wasn't. I just needed to know, at any moment, whether you were awake.
Your one o'clock lunch was my seven a.m. breakfast, so that's when we ate together, on a laptop propped against the toaster. I know what your street sounds like at lunchtime. I know the man downstairs who whistles. I've never met him, and I'd recognize that whistle anywhere.
We counted flights instead of anniversaries. Twenty-three of them. I can still tell you which ones were delayed.
Now that we live in the same city, I promise to never get used to it. I'll still ask how your morning went at one o'clock, even though I was there for it. I'll learn the bacalhau your landlady taught you, and get it wrong, and keep trying. When you can't sleep, I'll be the one who's awake with you, except now I can just roll over.
The hardest part of loving you was the distance. The easy part was everything else.
Last night I took the battery out of that clock. We're on the same time now, and I'd like to stay there.
Why it works: The clock turns an abstract hardship into an object everyone can picture, and taking the battery out is a quiet ending that needs no explaining. The whistling neighbor he's never met is a light, oddly specific detail. The promises are about the new problem, being in the same room, which keeps the vows from looking only backward.
Make them yours
Borrow the shape, not the sentences. These open on one real moment, say one thing about the partner nobody else sees, make a handful of promises (mostly small ones), and come back to the opening detail at the end. Put your own moment, your own habit and your own promises in each slot. The guide to writing vows walks through each part.
Write yours, or check them
The vow writer starts from your own answers. The vows check times your draft and flags the lines every couple uses, without sending it anywhere.