We started planning in January. Four nights at a coastal inn, nothing expensive — a place Priya had stayed at and recommended, a converted Victorian house about three hours from the city. We found a room with a sea view. We priced out the rental car. I researched a hiking trail along the cliff path that had been on a list in my phone for years.
I booked two weeks of leave and split it: the first week for the trip, the second week for the kind of nothing that you need after you’ve been somewhere good. Nathan negotiated his schedule so he could take the same window. We told no one we were going until the itinerary was set, partly because we had learned, over ten years, that announcing plans to certain people invited those plans to be reshaped.
By February we had reservations, a rental car confirmed, and a rough agenda that was mostly not-agenda — the intention to wake up when we felt like it, walk when we felt like it, eat at the places that looked right rather than the ones that had been recommended by someone else.
It was a small thing, in the scale of what people do for milestone anniversaries. It was exactly what I wanted. Not because I am someone who has small ambitions, but because I have learned over years of adult life that the things I most reliably want tend to be simpler than I expect: quiet, time, a particular kind of attention. The elaborate trip would have been fine. The modest one, planned together, was something closer to the specific hunger I was carrying.