On August 20, 2021, I dug through my not-yet-unpacked boxes that made the trek from San Diego to Brooklyn with me to find an outfit to wear on a first date. I wasn't sure how to dress, in part because I was entirely unaccustomed to the brutality of summer humidity in New York, but also because I'd spent all of an hour in Manhattan prior to this date so I wasn't exactly sure what the vibe of a brewery off the West Side Highway was meant to be. I still don't know, actually, what the vibe of a brewery off the West Side Highway would be like. As I stumbled through the west side of lower Manhattan, running late and hands shaking, I kept my eyes peeled for a girl from a Caribbean island (that I admittedly wouldn't have been able to identify on a map) and who'd messaged me a few minutes before "Just a heads up I dyed my hair red ahaha. I don't want u to be shocked." Before I'd had much time to run through any slew of worries about being catfished on Hinge, my now-wife approached me with an anxious "Hi!" followed by a breathless "I'm so sorry the place we're supposed to meet at doesn't exist." "That's okay! It's closed?" I asked her. "No . . . like . . . there's not even a building there." She was right. I turned, following the direction in which she was pointing, and our carefully chosen first date brewery was no where in sight. After a few moments of confused and blank stares past the elusive brewery and into the Hudson River, we rerouted the evening. I, being a horrific navigator even in the places with which I'm most familiar, followed Lil's lead as she directed us to a bar top at a nearby Italian restaurant. We talked about our mutual distaste for AirForce 1s, how long we'd both been in the city (not much longer than a few weeks for either of us), and how we’d ended up in New York from Trinidad and California. A beer at the bar top flowed into drinks at Stonewall Inn, which naturally lead to a nightcap at the piano-karaoke bar next door. I was in a place with which I was entirely unfamiliar with a girl who only had a few hours of conversation beyond a stranger and, despite all of my natural instincts, I felt entirely at peace. Our night concluded with a karaoke duet to Tina Turner's The Best and a Margherita pizza split between the two of us. The next few months went pretty similarly. We started our graduate programs at NYU's school of Public Health, Lil studying Public Health while I studied Bioethics. We managed our "long distance relationship" between Jersey City and Flatbush by spending a lot of time in the West Village; we studied together, ate together, ran together, met new friends together, and we'd pretty quickly built a sweet little life together. Since the fall of 2021, Lil and I have graduated from school, started new jobs, travelled all over the world, adopted our puppy (you know I couldn't write about our life without a mention of Phoebe Louise), lived in a handful of kinda-gross Brooklyn apartments, and celebrated so much of young adulthood together. On February 8, 2025, Lily asked me to be her wife. It couldn't have been any more perfect. Despite all of our plans for a long engagement, life rerouted us (as we're learning it tends to do), and we celebrated our marriage at the Brooklyn courthouse on April 11, 2025. Our wedding day was gorgeous and filled with so much love and joy. We simply cannot wait to get to celebrate with all of the people who have helped us to become the people we are and who have watched, in some form or another, as we built our life together. We are so honored that you would consider joining us in Trinidad in April 2026 to celebrate our marriage and we promise to do our due diligence in finding a location that certainly and undoubtedly exists. See you soon!