Wedding.

It could never have been any other way.

The little church, frosted pink and so reminiscent of a cake that it took willpower not to bite into it, with a trickle of a stream adjacent. A footbridge over the stream, hanging like a rainbow above and sustained by the shimmer of water below.

If you listened hard enough, you could eavesdrop on the stream's monologue. Those who had married there imagined that it whispered of the durability of human love - an endless song of sweetness for the soon-to-be-wed; an assertion that the greatest obstacles to the beloved are translated into glances of adoration or long sighs of contentment.

It could never have been any other way, not for the Australian woman who had been uprooted from her homeland and emigrated because of the abstract idea of marriage, nor for the hotchpotch of symbols to whom she had committed herself - the near-autistic for whom the event meant breaking through the surface of normality for a brief period before the inevitable return to even greater depths.

It could never have been any other way rang out from the church bells, and was spelt out in the clouds above, and was audible on the lips of those gathered. The inevitable progression from a pair of online ghosts to the union of the flesh, under God, was almost complete, and it could never have been any other way.

Later that night, with darkness falling and the silhouette of his new wife receding into the umbra, the groom realised with heaviness: of course it could have been any other way - I must've come this close to losing you a thousand times, or alternatively not meeting you in the first place. Far from being infinity, we are nothing but a particular thin shaft of history which could have shattered irreparably at any moment you like. We exist on a tightrope, and an unkind breeze is more than enough to send us both screaming back to atomisation once again.