The anniversary remembers a promise; the intervening days show how it was inhabited.

A date can hold a promise the way a photograph holds a room, accurately and without much of the life in it. What was actually promised gets answered in the year between anniversaries: the ordinary evenings, the illnesses, the small repairs nobody photographs. Celebration is a good custom, but it reports rather than proves. The relationship lives in the days that carry no label.

Rather than saving your attention for the marked date, take one unremarkable evening this week and give it the care you would give the occasion. Notice how the promise is currently being kept, in practice, on a Tuesday.