A friend was married yesterday. He and his girlfriend have been dating since university. He waited as she travelled around the country to take photographs; she stayed strong as he travelled abroad to learn fight choreography. He sobbed like a baby during the speech, and again when she asked him to repeat it in private the day after.

There are no words for the first, and too many words for the second. Even to write about the first seems to be breaking a secret rule, one that I have never encountered before yet have known in my heart since I was a child — if you do not acknowledge it, it does not exist. If I do not write about it, then it never happened. But to deny it happened is to deny her, and that we can never do.

In contrast, the second needs more and more words, each running after the other in a gleeful stream, a loop that seeks to corral the ever-expanding happiness of a couple and their friends in the best moment of their young lives. If I acknowledge it and paint this second, this laugh, that smile in words on a screen, then I hold it. I fix it like the gumamela flowers I used to press as a child, whose dye would stain my hands, the rock, the paper, purple and pink, vivid and permanent.