Three Years Late to Our Own Honeymoon

The Wedding We Never Followed Up On

We got married on a Thursday because the venue was cheaper midweek, and forty people came, and my aunt cried during the vows the way she cries at everything including adverts for insurance. Sarah wore her mother's shoes because we didn't have the budget for new ones and honestly she looked better in them than anything we could have bought. At the end of the night, sweating in my hired suit, I told her we'd do a proper honeymoon once things settled. I remember saying that exact word, settled, like it was a place we'd eventually arrive at rather than a thing that kept moving further off whenever we got close.

Three years is a strange amount of time to carry a promise around. Long enough that people stop asking about it. Long enough that you start telling the story of your own procrastination like it's a joke instead of a small, low grade guilt that sits behind your ribs.

Money, Then My Mother

The first year it was money, plainly. We'd used most of our savings on the wedding and a deposit on a flat with damp in the second bedroom that took eight months and most weekends to fix. Every time we had a bit put aside, the car needed something, or the landlord before the flat wanted his last month's rent, and the honeymoon fund kept getting quietly raided and never quite refilled.

Then, just as we'd actually saved something real, my mother got sick. Not dramatically at first, just tired all the time, and then tests, and then a diagnosis that turned our evenings into hospital car parks and vending machine coffee. I don't regret a single visit. I'd do every one again. But I remember lying next to Sarah one night, both of us staring at the ceiling, and her saying, very gently, that it was fine, we didn't need a honeymoon, some people never get one at all. And I remember thinking that was the kindest and saddest thing anyone had ever said to me, because I could hear how much she meant it and how much she was also just trying to make it easier for me to keep putting her second.

My mother came through it, thank God, and by the second spring she was well enough to tell us, more or less in these words, that if we didn't book something before her next birthday she was going to book it for us and not tell us where we were going.

The Drive North

We flew into Vilanculos on a small plane that rattled in a way that made Sarah grip my hand and made me pretend I wasn't gripping hers back just as hard. From the window the land went from ordinary brown scrub to this sudden, almost unbelievable turquoise, sandbanks showing through the shallows like something painted rather than photographed. I'd spent nights before the trip scrolling through options for Mozambique beach resorts, half planning and half just needing something to look forward to that wasn't a hospital corridor, and none of the photos had quite prepared me for seeing it for real, tilted sideways out of a small window with my ears popping.

The transfer from the airstrip took us along a dirt road with goats wandering across it and kids waving at the vehicle without any particular urgency, like waving at cars was just something you did in the afternoon. Sarah had her hand out the window the whole way, and I kept looking at her instead of the scenery, which I suppose is its own kind of honeymoon behaviour, three years late or not.

The Smell That Told Me We'd Arrived

You smell the Indian Ocean before you properly see it. It's not like other seas I've known, there's a warmth to the salt, something almost sweet mixed in with the diesel of the boats and the woodsmoke drifting from somewhere. When we finally walked down to the water that first evening, I stood there longer than I meant to, just breathing it in, and Sarah laughed at me and asked if I was going to cry, and I said no, obviously, and then had to turn away for a second because I was closer to it than I wanted to admit.

It wasn't really about the beach. It was about the fact that we'd made it to a beach at all, after three years of the trip existing only as a sentence we said to comfort each other.

Prawns, 2M, and Learning to Sit Still

We ate prawns almost every night, the kind that come to the table still faintly smoking from the grill, peri peri sauce running down our fingers in a way that made cutlery feel pointless. I drank more 2M than I probably should admit to in writing, cold enough that the bottle sweated onto the table within minutes, and Sarah stuck to the local gin, and neither of us checked our phones for whole stretches of evening, which for two people who run their own small business was practically a miracle.

There was a night we sat out near where the boats come in from Bazaruto, watching lights bob on the water, and I realised I'd gone almost two hours without thinking about invoices or my mother's next check up or anything at all beyond the food in front of me and the woman across the table. Sarah had booked most of the details, and at one point she showed me the shortlist she'd worked from months earlier, a handful of tabs for Mozambique luxury resorts she'd kept open on her laptop through the worst weeks of the treatment, like she needed proof, even then, that there was something waiting on the other side of it.

What Rest Actually Felt Like

I used to think rest meant not working. It turns out it's something closer to not bracing. For three years I'd been braced, for a bad scan result, for a bank statement, for the phone ringing at a strange hour. On that coast, with nothing urgent within reach, my shoulders came down from somewhere near my ears and stayed there. Sarah noticed before I did. She said I looked like myself again, which is a strange thing to hear about your own face but I understood exactly what she meant.

We snorkelled out near a sandbank one morning and just floated afterwards, not talking, salt drying tight on our skin, and I thought about how odd it is that you can be married to someone for three years and still be learning how to simply be still next to them without an agenda.

The Last Morning

On our last morning we walked the beach at low tide, when the sand goes hard and ribbed and you can see for what feels like a kilometre in either direction. Sarah asked if I still felt guilty about how long it took us to get there, and I thought about it honestly before answering. I said a little, but less than I expected to. Somewhere along the trip the guilt had quietly swapped itself for something else, gratitude maybe, or just relief that we hadn't let the delay become permanent the way it does for some people.

Before we left, sitting in the shade waiting for the transfer, I found myself scribbling a note on my phone, half a plan for the next trip already, comparing lists of the best hotels in Mozambique like three years hadn't taught me anything about how quickly good intentions get overtaken by ordinary life. Sarah read it over my shoulder and just said, quietly, next time we don't wait so long. I told her I'd hold her to that, and for once I meant it as a promise I actually intended to keep on schedule.