See the Couple in the Background? I Married Them.
On August 11, 2017, for a few hours, Santa Clara County, California, granted me the legal authority to marry two people.
And I had almost completely forgotten about it.
Javier and Brenda are two Puerto Rican friends I met while living in the San Francisco Bay Area. We connected almost immediately for a very particular reason: three people from Caguas, Puerto Rico, had ended up finding each other thousands of miles from their hometown, in California.
By 2017, Javier and Brenda had already built a life together. That wedding wasn't the beginning of their story.
Why did they decide to get married right then? I don't remember the details very well.
And there's something stranger still: neither Javier nor I remember exactly how that decision turned into a considerably odder one — that I would be the person to marry them.
What I do know is that I took the responsibility very seriously.
I filed the paperwork with Santa Clara County and obtained a special authorization, valid for a single day, to perform their marriage.
And then I wrote the ceremony.
A few lines from the ceremony script I found years later.
I recently came across the original script.
At one point I told them that if they stayed guided by their commitment, "not by religious visions or by civil law, but by their desire to love each other and live together fully and without limits", that commitment would help them steer the life they were building together.
I wanted the ceremony to be meaningful but completely secular. And apparently, my 2017 version wasn't particularly subtle about it.
It's practically what I would say today.
There are other small details in that document that are unmistakably mine. One section is titled "NOW THE GOOD STUFF". Another simply says: "Ring Ring?".
That wasn't an elegant manuscript, prepared for someone else to read. It was my working script, written so that I could stand there, phone in hand, marrying two friends.
So there we were, in Carmel, on the California coast, doing something none of us would probably have imagined when we met, so far from Caguas.
Brenda and Javier exchanged the words they had prepared. They exchanged the rings.
And finally I reached the sentence that made that whole peculiar situation official: "By the authority vested in me, I pronounce you married".
And just like that, I had married my friends.
Now, going back through the photographs and finding that old script, I'm struck by how strange memory can be.
We remember the big chapters of our lives: the places we lived, the jobs we had, the relationships, the things we gave years to.
But tucked between those chapters are small stories that somehow end up disappearing into some corner of our memory.
Until a conversation brings them back.
Oh, right.
I once married two people.
Javier and Brenda are still very close friends and, almost ten years later, still married.
If that ceremony had anything to do with it, then I think I did a good job.
Running into something I had written years earlier had already happened to me when I gave ChatGPT a book I wrote in 2009.
Memory doesn't move in a straight line either, much the same way time folds in on itself when you look at history up close.
And ending up marrying two friends on a California coast fits neatly into the career I never planned.
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