Josiah and Nathan: He Picked Up A Flyer. Just In Case.

Some love stories begin with a grand gesture. This one began with a flyer. It was Pride 2006 at the Rainbow Festival in Sacramento when Josiah first laid eyes on Nathan — though Nathan didn't know it yet. Nathan was on stage, a singer-songwriter-pianist performing songs from his debut album Pocket Change, and something about the way he played stopped Josiah mid-step. He wasn't looking for love that day. He was there with someone else, a rebound relationship he was still convincing himself made sense. But he picked up a flyer for Nathan's CD release party anyway. Just in case.

By August, he was single. And he showed up to Trax. The night unfolded the way the best nights do — slowly, then all at once. Nathan was making his rounds, charming the room the way performers do, when Josiah's friend T-Ray slipped behind him, pointed directly at Nathan, and mouthed the words he likes you. Josiah was embarrassed. He was also paying attention. Later, outside near a parking meter, the two finally talked. Nathan was filming footage of his own party, moving through the crowd with a camera, when he drifted toward Josiah and his friends. What followed was the kind of conversation that doesn't feel like a beginning while it's happening — easy, unhurried, electric in the way only new things can be. At the end of the night Nathan asked Josiah if he'd like to help him take his equipment home. Being a gentleman, Josiah said yes. What Josiah assumed would be a one-night stand turned into breakfast. Then a road trip to Sacramento the following weekend — Nathan had another performance, and Josiah had offered him a ride. Nathan took him up on it. Apparently he still needed help with his equipment. They moved in together after three months.

Three months of taking turns spending nights — Nathan's place in the Haight, Josiah's apartment in Union Square where the cable car ding-dinged up Powell Street every morning like a cheerful, unwanted alarm clock. It wasn't the most romantic soundtrack but it was theirs. And then life, as it tends to do, got complicated. Within just a couple months of being together, Nathan began radiation treatment for a recurrence of cancer in his spine. Around the same time, Josiah underwent major orthognathic surgery — jaw realigned, wired shut for ten days. Nathan recovering on medication, Josiah unable to speak. Two people in their earliest weeks of love, choosing to show up for each other anyway. That choice — quiet and unglamorous and completely unromantic on the surface — was perhaps the truest beginning of everything.

Eight years later they were standing on the rim of the Kilauea caldera in Hawaii's Volcanoes National Park, just the two of them, no one else at the lookout. Josiah had spent months quietly planning — consulting his friend Rachel about rings, hiding a bottle of Veuve Clicquot and two champagne flutes in an ice chest in the trunk of the rental car, waiting for exactly the right moment. The volcano was the right moment. Nathan held Josiah from behind. The caldera glowed. And then Nathan — who had also been quietly planning, also consulting Rachel, also hiding a ring — told Josiah he loved him and asked if he wanted to spend the rest of their lives together. Josiah turned around and pulled two rings from his pocket. Nathan pulled two rings from his. Four rings. One volcano. One very surprised mutual friend who had apparently been advising both of them simultaneously and had neglected to mention that detail to either one. As luck would have it, only one of Nathan's rings fit Josiah's finger. They each wore the one the other had chosen. It was, somehow, more perfect than anything either of them had planned. They married the following year on their anniversary. Their friend T-Ray — the same one who had wordlessly pointed and changed everything that night at Trax — officiated the ceremony.

Trax, the bar where it all began, opened its doors for the wedding. The after party spilled into Johnny Foley's in Union Square where Nathan performed regularly in the basement dueling pianos and Rachel sang with whatever cover band claimed her that season. They took their closest friends and family on a Mexican Party Bus through every place that had ever mattered — every address, every bar, every corner of the city that had held some piece of their story. Then they made their way back through the city that had held their entire story — every bar, every corner, every cable car morning — surrounded by the people who had been there from the beginning. Josiah and Nathan have called San Francisco home for seventeen years, their story still writing itself in the most serendipitous of ways. The same people who pushed them together keep showing up — at the altar, on the stage, in the quiet in-between moments. In their world, love and the people who carry it have a way of finding each other again and again, as if the city itself has been in on it from the start.