On the day the first of my friends marries
I am in my father’s car with another friend,
his partner, on a stretch of the A6
between our hometown and the hotel
where the wedding will occur.

It is an uncommonly warm evening in April,
no breeze. I am in a checked shirt
and corduroy trousers, an envelope
in my hand that contains a little something
I wrote just a few days before.

It is less than a decade since school,
sixth-form afternoons, but now my friend
is settling into what is expected of us -
a person to love, nuptials in a room
brimming with those I don’t know,

the obligatory search for a home,
the space between kids and no kids.
Two nights ago we went to the pub,
me and him. We laughed, he fretted
about the speech he hadn’t yet written.

He is a happy man, a ring on the finger.
I will leave them to it, to bask
in the first pumpkin glow of married life.
Tonight is about them, so it should be.
Look at our lives, how we move on.