Lacey and I had been together for less than a year. Our love was still young enough to be breathless. We hated leaving for work because it meant hours apart and rushed home because the other person was waiting. We left Post-it notes around the apartment with little declarations of affection. We surprised each other with meals and tiny gifts. I brought home flowers simply because I had passed some and imagined them in her hands. We were constantly touching, holding hands while we walked, leaning against each other on the couch, stealing kisses in doorways. We were discovering the particular language two people create when they are still amazed that they found each other.

A few months into dating, we moved into our first apartment together on Michigan Road. We did not have much money, and the apartment complex would never have appeared in a magazine spread about aspirational living. None of that mattered much to us. We had a front door that opened into a place where both of our things lived together, and that was enough to make it ours.

When you walked up the concrete sidewalk and through that door, the dining room sat immediately to the left. There was usually a jigsaw puzzle scattered across the table in some stage of completion. Straight ahead and slightly left was the kitchen counter, where we often burned a three-wick candle. That particular autumn, the apartment usually smelled like apple cinnamon and fallen leaves. The living room opened to the right, with an old three-piece couch that Lacey had owned for years. The sections could be separated into chairs or pushed together into a sofa. It was worn and firm and comfortable, already possessing the kind of character furniture earns from being lived on instead of displayed. We still have that couch today. I suspect we always will.

Straight ahead, between the hallway and a little alcove we used as an office, hung the first decoration we ever bought together. It was a glass sign inside a wooden frame with a small heart and the words, Home is wherever I'm with you. We had heard the phrase in “Home” by Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros, one of the songs that became woven into the beginning of us. We saw the sign in a store and bought it immediately, even though spending money on decorative signs probably had no business being part of our budget at the time. It was also the first thing you saw when you stepped through our front door.

Beneath it sat a bench where I often placed the flowers I brought home for Lacey. In photographs from that autumn, there are bouquets of deep yellows, reds and oranges sitting underneath those words. Outside, we filled pots with flowers and plants. By October, the trees surrounding the apartment had reached that brief Indiana moment when every leaf seems determined to spend its final days being noticed. Burnt orange and yellow covered the ground outside our door.

Autumn has always belonged to us. It is both of our favorite seasons, the time of year when the world seems to understand that comfort can be an art form. Blankets come out. Fires begin crackling again. Hot cocoa tastes appropriate. Apple pie becomes practically medicinal. The air turns crisp enough to wake you up when you step outside, while the trees spend a few weeks exploding into color before surrendering everything to winter.

That first autumn together was the first season we ever decorated a home as a couple. The apartment filled with maroons, browns, burnt oranges and yellow. There was even a pillow on our couch with the word AUTUMN written proudly across it, in case anyone missed the theme. The place itself helped. There were not many windows, so even during the day the apartment could feel like a little cave tucked away from the rest of the world. At night, it became a nook built for two people who had very little interest in being anywhere else.

One afternoon that October, How I Met Your Mother was playing above the fireplace. Three logs burned below the television, which was probably too many for such a small fireplace in such a small room, but we loved the heat. The flames gave off a soft roar punctuated by sharp little pops, and the light moved across the walls while the rest of the apartment remained dark.

Lacey was stretched across the couch beside me with her head tucked beneath my arm. At some point during the episode, the warmth got to her and she fell asleep. She had curled herself as tightly against me as she could, the way people do when their body has decided another person is the safest and warmest place available. Every few minutes she would wake just enough to wiggle closer, then disappear back into sleep.

We were wrapped together beneath a quilt my grandmother had made me. It is mostly navy blue, burgundy and yellow, stitched together from different patches, and it has traveled through more versions of my life than almost anything I own.

There were years when I lost nearly everything else. Addiction, homelessness, moving from place to place, violence and chaos reduced my possessions at times to the clothes on my body and a few things I could carry. Somehow, I always managed to hold on to that quilt. It survived rooms I barely remember, cities I left behind, people who disappeared, and parts of myself I wasn't sure would make it out alive. By that autumn night, it had become one of my most prized possessions, a piece of my grandmother's love that had followed me through a life that had rarely handled anything gently. Now it was wrapped around Lacey and me. The same blanket that had survived so much uncertainty was holding the first life I had ever wanted to keep forever.

Her hand rested loosely in mine because she was asleep. I could feel the warmth of her body against my chest and arms. I remember the fire on my face and the quiet rise and fall of her breathing. The television kept playing for a while, but I had stopped paying much attention to it. Something inside me had become very still.

I started thinking about everything that had happened before her. The childhood I carried with me. The neglect and abuse. The years of mental illness I did not yet understand. The ways I tried to medicate a mind I didn't know how to live inside. Addiction. Homelessness. Violence. Lost relationships. Cities and rooms and nights that seemed to lead nowhere while I was living them. Then I looked down and saw her sleeping against me.

I remember feeling overwhelmed with gratitude. Every event in my life, beautiful or terrible, had somehow participated in delivering me to this particular couch on this particular October afternoon. Every decision I had made and every decision made around me had eventually narrowed into this small apartment, this fire, this quilt, this woman breathing softly against my chest. I would replay the entire sequence to arrive there again.

Every wrong turn. Every wound. Every mile. Every loss. Every unlikely coincidence in my life, and every impossible coincidence in the lives that existed before mine. I would let the whole enormous machine of history turn exactly as it had turned if, somewhere at the end of it, I was promised those few minutes with her hand asleep inside mine. I think that was the night I married Lacey in my heart.

There was no proposal. No ring. No witness. She was unconscious for most of it. I didn't make a vow out loud, and I don't remember constructing some grand sentence in my head about our future. I simply knew something with a certainty that required no explanation. Whatever came next, I belonged with her. My heart had reached the end of its wandering. Then I did something Lacey still doesn't know about.

My phone was sitting on the couch to my left. I moved carefully because I didn't want to wake her. I reached for it with my free hand, made sure the sound was off so there would be no shutter noise, and held it above us. I took one picture.

I wasn't thinking about Instagram or Facebook. I didn't take ten versions looking for better lighting. I never edited it. I barely looked at it after I took it. I simply wanted proof that this moment had existed. Some part of me understood that ordinary life is frighteningly good at swallowing its most precious seconds, and I wanted a small door I could reopen someday. So I took the picture, put the phone away and went back to holding her.

The photograph shows our hands resting together beneath my grandmother's quilt. You cannot see our faces. You cannot hear the three logs snapping in the fireplace or smell the apple cinnamon candle from the kitchen. You cannot feel the October air outside or see the fallen leaves scattered near our front step. The picture cannot tell you that she was asleep or that I was sitting there quietly trying to understand how my life had somehow brought me exactly where I wanted to be. I know all of that because I was there.

Lacey may be learning some of it for the first time as she reads this. I have never told her what that evening became for me. I don't believe I have ever shown her these photographs either. I keep certain things close because I like having pieces of our life tucked away, little gifts I can hand her years later and say, You had no idea what was happening inside me when this was taken. After the episode ended, I turned off the television. The room went completely quiet except for the fireplace.

For about half an hour, I sat there without moving. There was nowhere I wanted to go and nothing I needed to accomplish. I had spent so much of my life believing happiness must exist somewhere farther down the road that I nearly failed to recognize what it felt like when it finally sat down beside me and fell asleep.

Years later, the bright and dreamy love of that apartment would become something stronger. The love that once left Post-it notes and rushed home from work would eventually carry luggage across the country, build homes in unfamiliar cities, make vows in front of family, care for dogs, endure hospitals, survive fear, absorb loss, change shape and learn how to hold weight neither of us could have imagined in that little apartment.

I still cherish the young version of us, though. They knew very little about what was coming, and maybe that innocence was a gift. They knew how to make a worn couch feel luxurious. They knew how to turn a cheap apartment into a sanctuary. They knew that flowers beneath a wooden sign could become an altar of sorts. They understood that home could become portable when you found the right person.

There is a reason I want this story near the beginning of Prism of a Life.

There will be darkness here. There are stories I will tell about childhood, addiction, mental illness, homelessness, violence, paralysis, grief and the long work of becoming someone I can live with. Some of those stories will be difficult to write, and some may be difficult to read. They are pieces of my life, and I intend to tell them truthfully. Yet when I look across the whole spectrum, love carries a strange amount of light.

Twenty painful memories can occupy a room, and one memory like this can still illuminate every corner. I have learned that enormous love often hides inside scenes that appear almost embarrassingly ordinary while they are happening. A hand resting inside another hand. A sleeping woman. An old quilt. A television turning off. Three logs burning down in a fireplace while leaves collect outside. I wonder how many of those moments we miss.

There may be one happening in your life right now. Maybe someone you love is sitting across the room scrolling through their phone. Maybe your child is asleep against you. Maybe your dog has its head on your leg. Maybe someone made you coffee this morning without asking how you take it because they already know. Maybe there is a completely ordinary scene unfolding around you that an older version of yourself would give almost anything to enter again for five minutes. Look at it. Stay there a little longer.

You are standing inside the result of more causes than either of us could ever count. Trillions upon trillions upon trillions of things unfolded exactly as they did to bring the people you love into the same tiny stretch of time as you. That realization does not erase the suffering that came before or guarantee anything about what comes next. It gives the present its proper weight.

All life, when seen through the prism of love, is worthy of being cherished.

Forever still overwhelms me when I try to understand it intellectually. I cannot imagine an eternity that keeps extending beyond every horizon, or an infinity followed by another infinity. My mind eventually reaches its limit and simply gives up.

Love is the one place where forever feels easy.

I will love Lacey tonight. I will love her tomorrow. I will love her in ten years and fifty years. I will love her when my body is gone and, if there is something beyond this life, I will carry that love wherever I go. Give me a hundred lifetimes and I will spend them finding my way back to that couch. Give me an infinite number and I will keep choosing the woman sleeping beneath my arm.

Forever is the poem, and love is the language.

That October afternoon, inside a cozy little apartment on Michigan Road, beneath a quilt that had already survived one lifetime and beside a woman who would change the rest of mine, I quietly gave her everything I had left to give. My heart, trust, spirit, every tomorrow I could imagine, and every tomorrow beyond my ability to imagine.

The Making of Forever.