I convinced him
to go to prom with me. “They’ll all stare,” he muttered.
“Let them choke on it. You’re absolutely coming.”
We walked — well, rolled, technically — into the gym together. People genuinely did stare. A few good friends rallied around us, moving chairs aside, cracking stupid jokes until he finally laughed. My best friend, Tamsin, rushed over in her sparkly dress, hugged me tight, then leaned down to him. “You clean up nice, wheelchair boy,” she said warmly.
We danced together, me standing between his knees, his hands resting on my hips, swaying slowly beneath cheap gymnasium lights. I remember thinking, right then, that if we could genuinely survive this particular night, nothing else would ever manage to break us apart.
After graduation, we got married in his parents’ own backyard. Fold-out chairs. A cake from the wholesale store. My dress pulled straight off a clearance rack somewhere. Nobody from my own
side of the family showed up at all. I kept glancing anxiously toward the street, half-expecting my parents to arrive in some dramatic storm of judgment. They never did.
We said our vows beneath a cheap fake arch. “In sickness and in health.” It felt considerably less like an actual promise, and considerably more like simply a plain description of the life we were already living together.
We had a baby together a couple of years later — our son, Sawyer. I mailed a birth announcement straight to my parents’ office, purely because old habits genuinely die hard sometimes. No response ever came back. No card. No phone call. Nothing whatsoever.
Fifteen full years passed that way. Fifteen Christmases. Fifteen anniversaries. Fifteen years of me scrolling right past my own parents’ phone numbers, pretending the whole thing genuinely didn’t hurt anymore.
Life ran hard, certainly, but we made it work regardless.
Colton earned his degree entirely online, then landed a remote job in IT. He was genuinely good at it too — patient, calm, exactly the guy capable of walking somebody’s grandmother through a password reset without ever once losing his own temper. We fought sometimes, sure. About money. About sheer exhaustion. About whose actual turn it was to handle which particular crisis that week.
