Five years ago, my life was completely different. I had the same parents I have now, but that’s about it.

Five years ago last month, I didn’t know my wife. Not in the way my dad doesn’t know my mom; I mean we literally had not been introduced five years ago last July. I was living in a perfectly lovely one-bedroom apartment on the edge of the city in a pretty great neighborhood. I could walk to the grocery store. I could walk to two different movie theaters. I was rarely walking to either of those places five years ago this month, however, because I was still in the midst of my “early retirement”: I’d abruptly quit my job in September of ‘02 and devoted most of the following year to a long term research project determining the effects of sleeping until 3:00 p.m. on the human body. (My hypothesis was proven: all of the effects are positive, particularly those that offset the effects of staring at the ceiling until 4:00 a.m., until one day at the six-month mark when a switch flips in your head and your whole life turns into the last ten minutes of The Shining.) When the funding for my project reached ramen noodle levels, I took a subsistence job doing digital work for the local historical society. This job was fun and felt Important but did not put money back in the coffers. My checks were the fiduciary equivalent of slamming on the brakes at 80 miles per hour; you’re still crashing, but maybe you can give people a chance to get out of the way before you roll the car.

This was the state I was in when someone introduced me to my future wife. Was I so successful a fraud that I seemed like a good match for someone– anyone?– at that stage? I would have told you that day that I was perfectly happy; was I hiding the cracks as effectively from everyone else as I was from myself? Was I being given this beautiful young woman as something to shoot for? Was she just supposed to occupy me until the white-coated men with the butterfly nets arrived? I have no idea. I do know that my wife was a fish out of water here in town, and that she was fed up and just about to move back home when she met me. The poor thing.

Instead, we went to the Mexican place, and then we went to X-Men 2 at the second-run movie house, and then before you knew it we were a married couple with a damn-near-one-year-old and a big ol’ house and hopes and plans and that goddamned cat. It’s been an instant. It’s been forever. I have no idea how we got here, but I’d never go back. Thank God you came along when you did, sweetness. You are a miracle; if you hadn’t come along when you did, I’d be under a bridge somewhere right now.

As I look back on those five years, there is one story from our wedding that I keep wanting to tell. If you were there, you heard it already; if you weren’t, you won’t believe it. I wrote it up for a creative writing class I took a couple of months ago; it is gargantuan, but I’m going to try to serialize it here over the next few days. By this time next week, I will have gotten The Shoes out of my system once and for all. Be on the lookout.