The First Thing I'd Grab
If the house were on fire, Sebastian knows exactly what he would carry out: the wedding album, from the best night of his life.
Ask Sebastian what he would grab if the house were on fire and he does not have to think about it. The wedding album. Not the laptop, not the passports. The album.
It is not a particularly beautiful object. The cover is linen that has gone soft at the corners, and the spine cracks a little when it opens. Inside are the photographs from the best night of his life, and he means that in the plainest possible way. Nothing before or since has come close.
The parts the camera missed
What surprises people is how much of that night is not in the album. The photographer caught the vows, the first dance, the cake. He did not catch the moment before the doors opened, when Sebastian realised his hands were shaking and decided to let them. He did not catch the speech that went wrong in the middle and better at the end, or the song that came on after midnight that made everyone stop and sing.
The photographs are the door. The rest of the night is on the other side of it.
That is why the album matters. Each page is a way back in. A blurry shot of the dance floor brings back the heat of the room. A picture of an empty table brings back who was sitting there a minute before, and what they were laughing about.
Why it goes first
Everything else in the house can be replaced. Sebastian has made peace with that. What cannot be replaced is the way the album unlocks a night he never wants to lose the edges of: the voices, the small jokes, the people who were there.
So it lives on the lowest shelf, closest to the door. He takes it down more often than he would admit, usually on ordinary evenings, and turns the pages slowly until the night comes back to him.
