Before I begin, I would like to thank everyone who made today possible.
To Alandra’s family, thank you for travelling so far to stand with us in Mondstadt, and for bringing the jasmine, batik and blessings of Indonesia into the city where our life began. Thank you for raising someone who gives so freely of herself, and for trusting Lohen and me with a heart you loved long before we knew it. To my family, thank you for making room for a future that may not have resembled the one anyone first imagined for me. To Lohen’s family, thank you for welcoming both of us into yours. And to our friends, who have watched this relationship take shape through every uncertainty, difficult conversation and improbable turn, thank you for remaining beside us until we reached this day.
I had prepared more to say here. In fact, I prepared three versions. This was the one I believed I could deliver without interruption. That assessment appears to have been incorrect.
Alandra, before you, my life was precise. I do not mean that it was unhappy. It was simply organised around questions that could be approached through observation, evidence and time. There was the laboratory, the classroom, my research and my art. Most things were black, white or grey, and I found comfort in that. I knew what was expected of me. I knew where one stage would end and the next would begin. If an experiment failed, the variables could be examined. If a plan proved inefficient, it could be revised.
I thought a life could be built in much the same way. Then you came running into the science building, already panicking about a class that had not started. You sat beside me because it was the only seat left. Within minutes, you asked whether you needed a textbook, a laboratory coat, a knife or a sacrificial goat. You admitted that you had mistaken Introduction to Life Sciences for a course about philosophy and the human condition. You told a complete stranger that you were going to fail, and when he pointed out that deciding this in advance would only make failure more likely, you looked at him as though he had personally betrayed you.
Then, of course, you spoke about the handsome teaching assistant without realising he was sitting beside you.
I thought you would drop the class as soon as you understood your mistake. It would have been reasonable. Instead, you returned. You kept returning, even when the terminology frustrated you and the assignments made you question every decision that had brought you there. Somewhere along the way, I began looking for you before every lecture. I learnt the sound of your steps in the corridor. I noticed when your usual seat remained empty. I began allowing additional time during office hours because you always arrived with one question and somehow uncovered twelve more.
At first, I believed I was merely curious. I was… I simply did not yet understand the full nature of what I wanted to know.
You changed the course of my life so gradually that I did not recognise the change until every future I imagined already contained you. You taught me that a quiet life did not have to be colourless. Pink appeared in the notes you left between my papers and the faint marks of your lipstick on cups you forgot beside my desk. Yellow lived in the light from our kitchen when you insisted we eat together, however late I worked. Green became every small thing we chose to grow: the plants by our windows, the plans for our home, the parts of ourselves that became gentler because the others were there to protect them.
And then there was gold.
Gold is difficult to define here. It is not a single object or memory. It is the colour my life seems to hold when I wake and find you close, when I hear you laughing with Lohen in another room, when the three of us sit together in silence and I realise there is nowhere else I would prefer to be. Before you, I mistook the absence of colour for clarity. You did not make my life less clear. You showed me how much of it I had not yet learnt to see.
Lohen, I confess that when you entered our life again, I expected us to clash.
You are impulsive where I am cautious. You provoke questions merely to see what an answer will reveal. You act before I have finished accounting for every possible consequence, and you have an unsettling tendency to call this efficiency. Yet somehow, what should have produced constant conflict became balance. What you do not notice, I remember. What I hesitate to say, you bring into the open. When I am uncertain whether a choice is safe, you find the courage to make it possible. When your certainty becomes reckless, I ask you to look again.
We do not complete one another because either of us was incomplete. We make more room. For her, certainly, but also for each other.
You became the person I trust to understand the parts of her I may miss, and the person who refuses to let me disappear into myself when I am the one who needs to be understood. I love you in the shape that belongs only to us, built from trust, disagreement, shared responsibility and the quiet certainty that if I reach behind me, you will be there. Thank you for never treating her love as something to win from me. Thank you for becoming my family.
Alandra, there was a time when I thought loving you well meant predicting every way I might fail you. You taught me that love is not the elimination of uncertainty. It is what we choose to do inside it.
So I will not promise you a perfectly measured life. There will be results I cannot anticipate, plans we must revise and days when one of us cannot be what the others need immediately. I promise instead to remain present. I will tell you when I am afraid instead of constructing futures alone. I will listen when you tell me I have missed something. I will treat your words, your work and your dreams with the same seriousness I give my own, because they have never been lesser. I will continue learning every person you become without assuming that loving who you are today gives me the right to stop being curious tomorrow.
I promise to care for Lohen beside you and for the bond the three of us are building. I will not ask either of you to become smaller so our life is easier to explain. I will revise my plans when our happiness requires it. I will hold your hand through what cannot be solved, and when something can be solved, I will do everything within my ability to find the answer.
Alandra, Lohen — give me your hands.