Wedding Cake for Breakfast by Kim Perel

reading, I had the power to create exactly, detail for detail, the world I longed to return to.
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    When I reluctantly emerged from my fictional fog at the end of each day, all I had for comfort was the new ring on my finger. Had our marriage been anchored on flimsy foundations, I might have worried that this tumultuous time apart would drive a wedge between us. Instead, I imagined my ring as one end of a steel (okay, platinum) line connecting me to Sacha, a bond I could display to anyone in our quickly disintegrating world and say, “That man out there? Mine. Thousands of miles and languages and currencies and topographies away, but he’s mine. I have official proof that is recognized on every inch of this planet.” I’d always been an advocate of same-sex marriage, but now I felt in my gut what it meant to have that piece of paper in hand, and how it would be nothing short of a nightmare to be denied one. There are times, especially in the uncharted waters of early marriage, when that paper is all you have.
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    Sacha returned safely from that trip and we finally got started on married life under the same roof. He began working at his new job, I finished my screenplay, we stopped wearing contact lenses, because the grit that drifted up to us from Ground Zero meant constant eye irritation. We went out, we ordered in, we held up thank-you signs on the West Side Highway to flash at the endless caravan of construction vehicles. We read books, we went to movies, we wondered whether New York City had a future.
    A bond that began to form during wedding planning strengthened during these months. To survive caterers, florists, and even our wonderful parents, Sacha and I had developed a mantra: Us Against The World. I know this sounds like an antagonistic way to go about the sugary business of nuptials and life in general, especially when you consider that our parents are among our favorite people in the world—a reasonable, lovely quartet who shared the same ethics and aesthetics with each other and us. But even reasonable, lovely people will sometimes focus on details you do not care about, like, say, the menu, or the color of the flowers, or the quality of the hotels in which they are going to house their relatives.
    Letting us form a new bond, sometimes against them, was the greatest gift they gave us—graciously conceding their spots to the upstart newcomer marrying their precious child—and one that was indispensable during that first year as husband and wife, when our world was unnavigable. Part of early marriage is learning to put someone ahead of your parents, as painful and unsettling as that may be for those of us who come from tight, happy families. (It’s anyone’s guess whether I’ll manage to be half as merciful to the people my children marry. I practice acceptance now, while they are three and six, to get a running start.) We began to see ourselves as one entity before the wedding; the tragedy that surrounded us during our first year cemented that perception.
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    Seven months into marriage, Sacha traveled again, only this time it was to lecture on a cruise up the Orinoco and I got to go with him. Instead of bags of rice, there was a chef on board reported to have been snatched up from a three-star hotel in Paris and there were seven kinds of cake at dinner every night. Seven. I’m not exaggerating and my memory has not dimmed (someday scientists will discover a lobe of the brain charged entirely with remembering significant meals). We set sail on a large yacht with seventy passengers who had paid to see the wonders of South America during the day and be enlightened by my husband and his PowerPoint show at night.
    One evening aboard the ship, the schedule of events was reversed. After dinner, everyone gathered in the