I am not prone to writing about myself—or at least, when I do, it tends to be a displaced version of myself and there are swords and/or dragons involved. Where I have written about my actual life, it’s been because someone died. Everything I write these days, even the swords and dragons, tends to take on the tonal quality of a thousand-yard stare. I write into the middle distance. 

So I find myself at something of a loss when I set out to write about something that makes me… happy. So, so happy. I’ve cultivated a dozen ways to describe ennui and lingering gloom, but I can’t come up with a word that does justice to the story I’m trying to tell now. I want to bang on keys for lack of an adequate superlative and gesticulate furiously at my fianceé until you see what I see. Get it, I implore you. Understand.

But I can’t make you do that. Love is one of those words that just doesn’t do enough. But I can try to tell you our story, and maybe give you a glimpse of her through my eyes.

—Angus

Bellefonte, Pennsylvania

I remember the Bellefonte river walk. It’s a big concrete slab along Spring Creek like a long patio, which stretches along below the two bridges that cross the water. Some ways along, there’s a set of long steps which fly fishermen to use to get in and out of the river. I sat there with Victoria on a sunny August afternoon on our first “not-a-date.” You see, Victoria was dating someone else at the time and was under the impression that our outing was purely platonic. That I was seeking nothing more than support from a classmate following the death of my mother some months previous. While it certainly was that, the support I was seeking was not something you could apply the word platonic to. 

I went on a lot of dates that fall, with a lot of women. Just about anything to not think about the one I’d lost. But what I remember about that August afternoon on the steps is not that Victoria was empathetic, or kind, or comforting, though she was all of those things. I’d gotten all of that plenty. No, the reason I remember those steps is because it was where she started arguing with me.

I had a spiel I’d developed by then about studying astrophysics, our shared major, which was, in essence, that it was as close as I could get to a philosophy degree while still doing calculus. It was a way to be disarming, to put down the anxiety barrier that goes up with a lot of people when you tell them that you’re studying astrophysics or quantum mechanics, cloaked as they are in so much arcana (a largely undeserved reputation, but that’s another story). I gave Victoria that spiel, and rather than accepting it with the smile and laugh that I was used to, she paused, collected her thoughts, and then launched into an extended counterargument about all the things we as a species now have because of astrophysics research (GPS, Velcro). 

This would be the subject of the rest of that first not-a-date, and I remember the feeling I had on those steps. Being charismatic, connecting with people, is something I typically find to be work-intensive. My best and worst quality is my wandering mind: I like to make connections, to explore systems, to poke at how disparate factors add up to cultural realities. Another way to say that is, “I’m bad at staying on topic.” With most people, I make an effort to reign it in. With Victoria, I didn’t have to. She matched wits with me, something I had never really experienced from a peer. And more remarkable still, no matter where our conversation went, it seemed like she had some specific knowledge of the subject and insight into it. I didn’t know at the time that Victoria does research for fun.

We went on a few more not-a-dates that fall, all of them with the very clear and extremely one-sided understanding that this was purely platonic. We talked about astrophysics, and storytelling, and the ethics of being in an industry aptly described by Neil deGrasse Tyson as being an “accessory to war.” She debated me about all of it. She stood her ground, never ceding a point on which she wasn’t convinced and pushing my understanding of things I thought I knew well. And I loved it. Pretty soon, I realized I loved her. 

So I told her. And she shot me down. 

We're good friends. Come back when you stop wanting more. 

I'm dating someone else.

Winter came and went. We had a class together the next semester, one where we had to form study groups of three. I recruited another friend first so it would look like I was only reaching out to Victoria because we needed a third member. I waited. We were good friends, and she didn’t need to know I still wanted to be good-er friends. I found out around Valentine’s Day—it was the first time I could bring up significant others casually. 

After we told him we’d started dating, the third guy in that study group said, “No kidding.” Things between Victoria and I moved fast after that. The bond was already there, built on the months of ‘just friends.’ We were exclusive inside a week and effectively living together, bouncing back and forth between her place and mine, inside a month. Early that summer, we moved in together officially. We both knew what we wanted; in a culture increasingly dominated by relationships of convenience, we both wanted something deeper. We found it in each other.

—Angus

Chicago

I suspect that I would be able to rank Victoria and my early days on a scale of soap operas if I watched any. We met in the aftershocks of one of the darkest periods of my life, when my mother, my grandfather, and a close friend all died within months of each other during the summer of 2020. A year later, it would be Victoria’s turn for gathering stormclouds, when what started in July as some strange pain in her fingers rapidly spread into crippling pain, fatigue, and motor control issues that would leave her using a wheelchair full time for months through the winter of ’21-’22.

I remember this period in displaced snippets, little memories floating in an ether. When I try to talk about what happened, it’s like I’m trying to piece together someone else’s life from disconnected photographs: I can’t place them in time except by remembering a timeline I feel like I read in a textbook and noting that Event B must have followed Event A. I remember the months of Victoria at home, in bed, in pain, barely able to move. I remember the late night ER trips. I remember the neurologist who walked into the appointment in a fluster, repeatedly wondered aloud why they had sent Victoria to him, and sent us away with the flippant suggestion that Victoria had “psychosomatic syndrome,” little more than the 21st century’s replacement for diagnosing women with hysteria. I remember walking through a park in State College one morning that winter, pushing Victoria in her wheelchair on the uphills, her snickering as she outpaced on the downs. I remember the white snow and the black asphalt and the muddy line between them, and I remember the peace I made on that walk: that I would be okay if Victoria never got out of that chair.

But if I rank our relationship against soap operas, I think I am obliged to rank Victoria on a scale of superheroes and Greek myths. Throughout it all, Victoria never gave up, never despaired. She made appointment after appointment with neurologists, cardiologists, gastros and physical therapists. We traveled further and further (it turns out that you don’t wind up practicing medicine in rural PA because you just love the Rust Belt), and I can remember the hour-long car ride home after we got a probable diagnosis of MS—an hour we spent in relief, because that was on the mild end of the things we were afraid it could be. But then the spinal tap—yeah, she got a spinal tap, and I was the one freaking out—came back negative. And when she got the test result, Victoria nodded, said, “Yeah, MS wouldn’t explain the pain,” and started making appointments again. 

It took months and a trip to Boston to finally get the real diagnosis: Functional Neurological Disorder—a bizarre and young diagnosis that is encapsulated by the following: Victoria couldn’t walk, but she could run. If the brain is a computer, most neurological diseases are “hardware” problems: your wires have been cut, signals aren’t getting where they need to go in some physical sense. FND is a “software” problem: the signals that Victoria’s brain sends out get where they're supposed to go, but they’re scrambled beyond recognition by the time they do. Boston would be only the first long trip: the best place in the world to treat FND is Shirley Ryan AbilityLab in Chicago. We drove out in January 2022, terrified at the prospect of taking a plane because if she caught COVID on the flight, she wouldn’t be admitted and could be waiting months longer.

I remember being in the hospital room with her after we’d checked in, knowing that I was leaving her there. That I had to turn around and drive home. The surreality of these moments is in how offensively normal they are. I think when they come, we all wonder on some level where that quiet, sad piano line is. Why isn’t the soundtrack kicking in to give this moment the weight it deserves? But for me, at least, this feeling isn’t just outside, it’s inside. I remember waking up on the day my mom died and realizing that I still had to pick what to have for breakfast. Shouldn’t it matter more today? Shouldn’t I stand in front of the fridge and be unable to choose? But I don’t. I just grab the eggs and the bacon and go on about it. 

That day, I had to leave. To turn around and drive home. I had class on Monday. I had to do my homework.

In the meanwhile, Victoria would have to fight for control of her body back.

The process of treating FND is akin to treating stroke victims, a grueling retraining of the brain and body that is as much trial and error as anything else. Victoria was alone in Chicago, states away from me and everyone else she knew, living out of a nearby hotel room when she no longer needed to live in the hospital. And so Victoria learned that Chicago public busses have good wheelchair accessibility and learned the bus routes. She found a Korean BBQ restaurant in walking distance (or rolling distance, as it were), which became her reward for for the ends of those weeks when the physical therapy was particularly intense. When we talked, she told me about the plays she’d gone to see, and when I went to visit, she took me to one. She bought purple rims for her wheelchair and a slew of tools, and sat on the floor of her hotel room tuning it up like some bad biker chick with her motorcycle.

Victoria got up out of that wheelchair in April 2022. She’s used it a couple times since, but the trajectory since then has been back toward normalcy. To this day she fatigues a little quickly, but in the two and half years since then, she’s gone from being unable to walk from our apartment to the car to having no trouble going for a day in the city, as long as we can take a break on a park bench now and then. And when we do, she doesn’t bemoan the lost time or the lingering gloom. She talks about the future, about where she wants to go from here, and how grateful she is that her body works.

Personally, I don’t feel an overabundance of gratitude for that. What I am grateful for, every day, is that she’s still here, and that she’s still her. I watched my mother slowly lose herself to a disease over four agonizing years. I remember the day, amid all this, that Victoria comforted me, as I curled up and cried, the only thought I could express being, “I can’t do this again.” I am grateful, every day, that Victoria is who she is. I did a lot of the literal heavy lifting that winter, but while it’s tempting to paint a picture of me taking care of Victoria, it would be a fiction. Victoria took care of Victoria. And she took care of me plenty, too. I just pushed the chair.

—Angus

Arizona

We were driving back toward those river walk steps in the spring of 2022, after Victoria came home from Chicago, when she told me that I had become the constant in her vision of the future. “It used to be graduate school,” she said, “and everything else was variable. I thought I wanted to do research, but now I don’t. I don’t know if I want to go to grad school, or go get a teaching degree, or go corporate, but I know that wherever I go, it’s going to be with you. You are the constant I see in my future.” It wasn’t a promise, but she made good on it all the same a few months later when I got into graduate school at the University of Arizona (which she had helped me apply for, amid the content of the previous verse). We moved in June of 2022, making the trip out with our cats in a single, 38-hour marathon.

I was worried about her, then. Victoria hadn’t finished her undergraduate at the time, having taken a medical leave of absence for obvious reasons. She intended to finish her degree remotely, but she didn’t really have a plan after that. For as long as I’d known Victoria, she’d always had a plan. Typically out for about five years demarcated by the hour. But she’d meant what she said. What happened next was less important than that we were together for it, whatever it was. 

As it looks increasingly likely that our lives will be dictated geographically by my career, Victoria has stuck to that. Although now it’s because, having started with a telecomm company at a local, entry-level engineering position, she’s raced up the corporate ladder to the edge of national leadership. I have to be somewhere. Victoria can go wherever she wants. The most important functionality that Victoria recovered in Chicago was her ass-kicking foot.

—Angus

Albuquerque

I won at engagement rings. In October 2023, Victoria and I took a trip to Albuquerque to see the ring-of-fire solar eclipse (because we’re space nerds), and I proposed to her under it. I don’t think anyone is finding a better ring than one from the literal sun.

Our favorite stories are often ones that come full circle, that end where they began. But that’s not this story. I think a lot about something Victoria said to me, pretty early in our relationship: “People don’t grow together anymore.” She was talking about the dating culture of our generation, which tells people that they ought to be fully formed before seeking a partner, and should search for one who slots cleanly into the life they’ve already built for themselves. But neither Victoria or I would be the person we each are today without the other.

There are little things that we can gesture at. I watch Survivor on Wednesday nights now; Victoria watches Arsenal games on weekend mornings. I eat way more Asian food than I used to; Victoria drinks more coffee than ever (even if she still likes it to taste like milk and sugar). I go to musicals; Victoria plays D&D. It’s tempting to write these things off as superficial, and indeed, I mean to point out that there are deeper elements than this, but I bring these things up because they are in many ways the foundation. Victoria and I have a relationship that didn’t begin with a list of overlapping interests but with a rapport, and we have each been shaped by the other, both in our interests and in our selves.

Victoria and I once had a conversation about our skills and what we brought to each other. Victoria has the skills to manage an adult life, to be successful and set us up for success. She has all the practical, foundational skills needed to make a happy life, things that I’ve generally ignored in favor of flights of fancy (I did mention the swords and dragons). The part she struggles with is the actually being happy. Victoria is better in a catastrophe than me, but has a habit of catastrophizing. That’s what I brought: stability, calm, and the willingness to have the hard conversations when they need to get had, before little things fester and become big things. When the end of the world comes, Victoria is who I want running things. I’m just here to remind her that the end hasn’t come yet. So we might say that if you wanted to wish us a successful and happy marriage, we’ve got you covered, because Victoria taught me to be successful, and I taught her to be happy.

I don’t have any desire to come full circle. I don’t have any desire for this story to end where it began. Our story began in a dark time, and much of it has been a process of lifting each other out of that murk. Our story is one of change and healing, of recovery and growth. We’ve gone from the gloom and grey of Pennsylvania to the sun-drenched southwest, to a place where you can wander out into the emptiness, look up, and see all the stars that we talked about on that first day by the Bellefonte river walk.

See? Even I can’t resist trying to close the loop. So I’ll leave you with one more.

Today, Victoria wears my mother’s engagement ring. Come on out for the party, where we’ll get the ones that match.

—Angus