Home, Rewritten

Last night, after dinner, my husband and I sat together on the couch with a glass of wine and decided — almost idly — to look through our wedding photos again. There wasn’t a reason, exactly. It wasn’t an anniversary or a date marked on the calendar. We were simply home, together, with nothing pulling at us, and it felt like the right kind of evening to remember something beautiful.

The photos arrived about a month ago. We had glanced through them once, of course, right after we received them — smiling at the familiar moments, laughing at the imperfect ones. But this time was different. We didn’t scroll through them quickly, chasing nostalgia; we lingered. We played our wedding playlist in the background — Van Morrison, The Lumineers, Fleetwood Mac — and let ourselves step back into it, song by song, image by image.

There’s something about seeing yourself from the outside that can make a memory more real. In one photo, he’s looking at me during our first dance, his eyes soft but certain. In another, my sister-in-law/maid of honor is laughing at the dinner table, the light catching her in the exact way it has since our young teenage years. In another, the venue, akin to Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Secret Garden, behind us like a dream.

The photos tell the story of that day, yes — but they also tell the story of something quieter: how we made a homecoming out of pain.

Our wedding was in Santa Barbara, my hometown. I knew early on that I wanted to be married there, though it wasn’t the obvious choice. It’s a beautiful place — graceful, sun-drenched, postcard perfect — but for me, it’s also the landscape of my most painful years. My adolescence unfolded there in sharp contrast to its beauty. The same streets that tourists photograph so fondly were, for me, once filled with confusion, abuse, the long ache of figuring out who I was and where I fit in a world that didn’t want me exist let alone succeed.

To go back for our wedding was not just to choose a location. It was to choose a reclamation.

Santa Barbara was the first place my husband and I ever traveled together. It was early in our relationship — one of those weekends where everything still feels tentative, like it could fall apart if you breathe too loudly. We stayed in a small inn a few blocks from the beach, walked the same streets I used to avoid, and something shifted in me. The place that once held so much loneliness began to feel lighter, easier. His presence changed the landscape.

And so, years later, when we stood under an archway of flowers and a perfect blue sky, I felt that transformation fully. It wasn’t that love had erased the pain — it had rewritten it. It had softened the edges, turned those streets and hills and beaches into something expansive again. I wasn’t haunted there anymore. I was home.

Looking at the photos last night, that truth landed differently than it did in the weeks right after the wedding. There’s a clarity that only comes when you’ve had time to step away from the moment itself, when the adrenaline has worn off and what remains is the quiet understanding of what something truly meant.

In one picture, I’m walking down the aisle with the expanse of the coastal mountains behind me. In another, we’re surrounded by family, faces glowing with that kind of joy that doesn’t perform — it just exists. The image isn’t perfect; my smile’s a little off centered, his tie is slightly crooked. But there’s such tenderness in it, such relief.

That’s what I keep coming back to — the relief of finding beauty in a place where I once felt small.

I think we underestimate the quiet power of going back to the places that hurt us, not to relive the pain, but to reclaim the story we tell about it. For years, I avoided Santa Barbara unless I had to. I had folded it neatly into my past, telling myself that certain chapters were better left closed. But life, I’ve learned, is generous with second chances. Sometimes, it gives you the chance to write a new version of the same story — with better light, better music, and someone standing next to you who helps you see what you couldn’t before.

That’s what love does, I think. It doesn’t rewrite your history — it reframes it.

Sitting with him last night, with our wedding playlist drifting through the living room and the flicker of the TV casting a soft glow across the photos, I realized that what we were really doing wasn’t just reminiscing. We were participating in an act of remembering that was active, not passive. We were choosing to remember well.

Because memory, like place, can be rewritten — not in the sense of denial, but in the sense of reclamation.

When I was younger, I thought healing was a process of moving on, of leaving things behind. But maybe it’s more about turning back toward them, gently, with new eyes. Maybe it’s about being able to walk through the same streets that once made you ache and feel gratitude instead of grief.

There’s a photograph — my favorite one — of us standing near the reception tables just after sunset. The candles are beginning to glow, the sky is darkening, and we’re laughing, my head tilted back in unbridled joy. I remember that moment perfectly, though I didn’t know then that it would be the one I’d return to most. I was looking around at everyone — our friends, our families —and thinking, This is what peace feels like.

And last night, looking at that image again, I thought, This is what reclamation looks like.

Love is so often spoken of as expansion, but sometimes it’s also a return — a quiet circling back to what once was, seeing it through the softer lens of who you’ve become. Our marriage, even in its early days, has been an exercise in that. Not in constant novelty, but in deepening. In learning that joy can coexist with memory, and that healing can look like a dinner at home, a glass of wine, and a playlist that once underscored one of the most meaningful nights of your life.

I don’t think I’ll ever stop being amazed by how love can alter geography — not just of the world, but of the self. Santa Barbara hasn’t changed much. The ocean still glitters the same way. The Spanish tile rooftops still catch the light in that particular, honeyed hue. But the version of me who walks its streets now is different. The place that once felt like the edge of something painful now feels like the beginning of something whole.

And maybe that’s what this marriage continues to teach me — that home isn’t just where we live, but what we reclaim.

Last night wasn’t planned or ceremonial. It was just two people sitting on a couch, remembering. But it felt sacred in its own right — a reminder that love isn’t only in the grand gestures, but in the quiet revisiting of the moments that made you who you are.

When we finally closed the laptop, the music still playing softly, I thought again of that coastline — the one that had held both my pains and my joy — and I felt an almost imperceptible shift inside me.

I had turned pain into purpose.

And purpose, as it turns out, looks a lot like peace.