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The worst part of June was the heat. Sweat dripped a slow trail down the pale dome of Dan’s forehead before it fell into his eye. The world became a salt blur, smearing the handsome outline of his beloved. His Phil. He wiped the drop away. Nerves to sweat, sorrow to tears. How strange it was that a body’s liquids were emotions in their rawest form. It was nearing the end of their wedding ceremony and Dan was holding Phil’s hands. At once he felt 34 and 28 and 18. Felt the sun beating down overhead, shining on their limbs like radiation could burn away all their layers of grief. Like grief wasn’t just love evolved.The wedding was perfect in every way except for the heat. Dan was melting; his body entirely liquid. Blasted outdoor summer wedding. Really, he should’ve thought of this. Thought of Phil’s alabaster skin, how easily it burnt, how easily it aged, how easily it wrinkled. He loved those wrinkles though. The pronounced laugh lines that creased the corners of his eyes.They’d wanted a June wedding. Well, Dan wanted a June wedding. Phil brought up December, painted a picture of a wedding with pillowing snow that sparked crystalline flashes under the photographer’s lens. December, he’d said, crisp and earthy and joyful. We can write our names together in the snow.But snow was too temporary a medium for the two of them. What they had belonged in stone, in steel, in the foundation of the universe. Dan could see it. A December wedding. Not the first week though. The first week of December was a private thing, just for them. He could picture pine-bough centerpieces and warm violin music. Cinnamon rice and eager dusk. A wedding like that would need to take place in a barn or maybe a cottage. Something whimsical and cliche, like a bad fairytale. But Dan’s love for Phil wasn’t a fairytale, it was real and had as much blood as any other living thing. It stuck and hurt and grew wounds that healed. It lost teeth and felt pleasure and grew with age. Their love was a breathing thing, and so, Dan reasoned, they had to have a June wedding. Late spring, early summer. When life uncurled again. When the world came back in full force after the thick endless night of winter. June. Not December. Dan had said to Phil, Eucalyptus and baby’s-breath. I’ll wear a white suit and you’ll wear a green one. No black? Phil joked.
Black is for funerals and the everyday. There’s nothing to mourn about us. There’s nothing mundane.
And that line had been what sold Phil on the whole thing. June. A few weeks after Dan’s birthday, so he could celebrate his independent identity— celebrate as the entity Dan Howell — one last time. And at that party, he had worn black. Phil’s hands were clammy as hell in the June heatwave. Dan’s were rough. They got dry in the summer and were vaguely calloused from the time he tried to learn real guitar after beating Guitar Hero. In their delicate grip, though, their newly polished rings glinted under the warm glow of the setting sun. Nothing about them was perfect, but it was beautiful. And that’s exactly how Dan wanted it.It was barely dusk and the stars had yet to come out. Not that Dan had much hope they’d see any this close to suburban London. They’d have stood a better chance of seeing stars if they’d had the wedding in their backyard. Dan brought up the idea once, but if they were having a spring wedding Phil wanted something exceedingly green. Topiary bushes and flowers and vines, he’d said. Dan was a pilot lost in the sky of Phil’s eyes, crushed by his atmospheric pressure. The ozone layer of him. The freon of him. Phil Lester was the only apocalypse that Dan Howell would never survive. Nothing could take Dan away from this moment. Not the cicada song or The Rapture or his own dark tendrils of fear. Dan never thought he would get married, but it was June and Phil looked at him with wonder and made the most lovely little humming noises during the boring parts of the ceremony. His Phil. His Angelfish. His June Bug. His husband. What a word. It felt heavy in his mouth, wrong in the most reclamatory sense. Like he was saying it with a mouth full of apple pulp in a garden at the start of the world. But Phil’s name wasn’t a sin and the garden they were in was not In The Beginning, it was in north central London. It was a tiny celebration. Family mostly, their respective brothers and parents and grandparents. The small smattering of friends they’d acquired in their years together. PJ, Sophie, Charlie. I wish we could release a flock of pigeons instead of a flock of doves, Phil said back when they were planning the whole thing, both their brains still sleepy and addled from their latest world tour.
I don’t think people even release doves anymore, Bub. Animal rights issues or something.
I wish we could invite Steve and Scraggy, Phil said and Dan scoffed but fell even deeper in love. He loved Phil like he was a lake on a mountaintop and Phil was a pebble breaking the stagnant surface for the first time in a millennia. Later that night he’d messed around on Photoshop. Made two pigeon-sized invitations. Printed them out on fancy paper and tied them up in little ribbons. When he presented them to Phil even the moon could’ve gotten lost in the gravity of his smile. I love you. Phil said to him. Dan only knew how to say ‘I love you’ in pigeon wedding invitations and sex and tears. He kissed Phil and promised him one day they would have an animal that didn’t need to leave them to be happy. A dog or a cat or even a horse, if Phil wanted. All I want is you, Phil said.
Are you calling me an animal?
I’m calling you mine.
And Dan melted a bit at that. But Phil was right. Dan was an animal. He was territorial and protective, would bite and scratch and claw. He could smell danger from miles away, knew how to keep his eyes open on everything all at once. Dan was a predator who only learned prey response. A wasp afraid of the flowers. If Phil was a bug, though, he would be a June Beetle. Green and iridescent. A small creature that loved fruit and air and greenery. In the midst of the sweltering heat, the wedding officiant closed her leather notebook and smiled at the small, expectant crowd. It was almost over. The ceremonial part of the wedding, at least. They’d already exchanged rings. Said the obligatory ‘I do’s. Dan overthought for weeks how he’d say his, but in the moment he stumbled on the words. They poured out of him so fast, like his voice was hoping to outrun the anxiety.They all knew what was coming up. Dan, most of all. He’d been looking forward to it. Dreading it. It was the first time most of his family would ever see him kiss a man, and the shame in his gut was an algal bloom: beautiful, overwhelming, and destructive. Stop, he told himself. This is Phil. There is no shame in loving Phil. And so when the officiant told them to kiss each other, they did. Simple as that. Dan didn’t even flinch when the camera flash went off, as the wedding photographer captured the moment. When their lips touched, Dan thought about particle physics. Thought about quantum entanglement. How, no matter how much he tried to fight it, he was defined only after he found Phil. After he found what Phil was defined as. They were atoms, Phil spun up and Dan spun down and together they formed the slow matter of their universe. A universe of skin and hands and laughter, of gerrymandering hope. Kissing Phil was like growing flowers from a split tongue. It left a taste of beautiful iron behind the teeth, even when it was bloodless. The mouth was a forest and Dan had spent so long lost inside the dense maze of his own words, that he forgot flowers grew alongside the poison oak. They hadn’t written their own vows. Dan was too embarrassed and Phil couldn’t find the words to encapsulate something so big. Dan daydreamed, though, all the time of what he would say if they had. Years down the line it would be his only regret, that he didn't write vows. Didn’t get to publicly yap about his beloved. He hadn’t written vows, but if he had they would’ve sounded something like this:
You showed me I do not need to be perfect to be deserving. In no world do I deserve you, but I hold you in my arms anyway. I know every fingernail, every mole, every firm press of your mouth, every wrinkle. I know the way you won't walk on the grass so as to avoid crushing the clover. In the morning you smell like water vapor and stardust and every tear you cry convinces me that God must be real because the way emotion blooms within you is divine. You oil painting with teeth, you epistolary sunlight, you creature of my own pulse. If God ever did anything right it was forming you from atoms and mud, breaking your rib, and giving you to me. And I, in turn, give myself to you.
When the kiss ended, Dan ignored all the applause and pressed their foreheads together, took a breath just to feel the hot spring air swell deep in his lungs, tricked himself into thinking he could inhale Phil if he tried hard enough. When they were this close, so close that Dan could count the frail eyelashes that stuck out from Phil’s translucent eyelids, he forgot himself. Dan Howell became a heart without a body. When they pulled apart the world stopped entirely for two seconds, but only the earthworms under their feet noticed. The dying sunlight hit Phil’s cheekbones and he laughed, got that dreamy far-off look in his eye.Dan’s brain hadn’t stopped the imaginary vows yet. It rambled on.
I love you. I love being this close to you. I love you when there are no cameras around, when we can close doors and shut windows and pretend the world is only you and me and our eight limbs and our plush seal and our dying houseplants.
You’re every good thing I never let myself imagine I could have, because the wanting hurt too bad. But you never hurt. Every time I close my eyes I see a future with you, painted in different lights, in wedding veils and animal fur, in hospital visits, in joint content, in no content, in Isle of Man pebble beaches, in a world where the furthest you will ever be from me is a name call away.
Phil. Your name as it leaves my lips is its own Big Bang. The first time you opened your eyes the universe started expanding and my life began.
Congratulations boys, the officiant said. But what she meant was it’s forever, and Dan had never been less scared of a commitment. In the reflection of Phil’s eyes, he saw a thousand possible futures. Some lovely, some tragic, but in all of them they weathered it together. There were futures that tasted sour, futures that would rot before they fully ripened. But that was life. There were fruits you would want to eat that the wasps got to first, and wasps that would sacrifice their lives to create figs. The fruit on the Tree of Knowledge was pomaceous. Maybe an apple, maybe a pomegranate. If sin was born from devouring something sweet, then Dan was a sinner, because Phil in his emerald suit and frizzy hair, with his slightly uneven front teeth and soft ocean wave of a chin, was about to be devoured. Dan learned what hedonism meant when he looked at Phil. Lust and love and whims and whimsy. Phil was a pine tree with all its needles, he was the impossible stars in the thick slab of smoggy London sky. Phil had stayed with Dan despite the thousands of silences where Dan should’ve said I love you but instead let fear fill the gap between them.They’d grown into each other and up like two trees planted too close together, their branches braided and intertwined and home to an assortment of squirrel dens and bird nests and half-decayed acorn shells. They’d bumbled their way through sex, learned how to pepper spray the public eye, sang and danced and interviewed celebrities, drank and laughed and ran away from YouTubers at Vidcons. Here they were, now, hands linked in front of the people they loved most. It was their literal job to be viewed, but this felt different. Dan wasn’t sure if the soft flush of heat that bloomed across his neck was from the embarrassment, the unusually strong June heatwave, or simply his body's unstoppable reaction to experiencing this joy with Phil. Dan loved, but more importantly, he was loved in return.Phil Lester squeezed his hand, his face all angles and sunspots. I love you, he would say in all the gaps now. I love you, I love you, I love you. The words like a flock of pigeons exploding from his lips. He would never leave this man feeling anything less than loved and wanted and fulfilled. The music started playing again, their cue to walk, arm in arm, back down the aisle. Later there would be dinner and cake and dancing. There was an open bar, a rented Dance Dance Revolution machine in the corner, and a real dance floor big enough for all of them to sway their limbs in whatever awkward fashion they wanted. But before they walked back, Dan took a second. Took in the situation. The liquid in his eyes wasn’t sweat anymore, it was tears. He never thought he would see this day. Never thought he would want to see this day. Phil was before him, effervescent and official in his green suit. The two of them center stage and nervous, all fumbling mouths and shaking hands and sharp teeth. Dan kissed Phil again. Because he could. Because it scared him. Because it didn’t matter that the people in his life saw this, saw him kissing a man, because he was loved. Loved loved loved. A star in the early evening overhead winked into view and Daniel Howell finally felt lovable. Phil’s lips were soft and malleable. The kiss felt like all the hundreds before it. Safe. Welcome. Home. They were married in June, and Dan thought just maybe the winter of his life was finally melting into spring.