Before You Came Along
Each person writes down a real memory from before the couple met. The two of them get a few a day, illustrated, in the weeks before the wedding.
Most couples know the years before from a few stories told at dinner.
The people who were there have the rest.
A sister, a roommate, a coach tells one night: where they were, who was there, and what somebody said. Nobody writes a toast.
Each memory is drawn, so one of them can see the other at fourteen, somewhere they never were together.
Each one starts a conversation the two of them haven’t had yet.
You know a story about one of them that the other has never heard. So do most of the people who knew them first.
I built the first one of these for my wife’s birthday. Dozens of people carried memories of her that she had never heard. The people around a couple carry the same kind, from before the two of them met.
— Eric Page
From the first one, a birthday
“My heart is so full right now, I’m bursting.”
— Shirin
“We were out on a walk when one arrived from her dad. She read it and her knees buckled. She’d had no idea it meant so much to him.”
— Eric
A night Sam came and got you
Before you came along, there was a night in February when Sam was fourteen. I called him from a party I needed to leave. He had no license, so he talked Mr. Hale next door into driving forty minutes through the snow. He bought me gas-station fries and never told our parents.
— Dana, Sam’s sister
You never told me about the fries.
Dana told you about the fries?
We made this one up to show the idea.
Tell us about the two of them, then email the people who knew them first.
Each person picks one of the two and writes down a time from before the couple met. Every one gets drawn.
A few moments land on both their phones every day in the weeks before the wedding.
Start a couple of months before the wedding. The first moments land a few weeks before it.