How Do You Gift a Year?

Ava and Ethan got married in the Hunter Valley thirteen months ago. Big wedding, two hundred guests, a string quartet that played Bon Iver during the ceremony because Ethan cried when Ava suggested it. They'd been together since uni. The wedding felt inevitable — the best kind of inevitable — and the year since has been the quiet after the earthquake. Furniture shopping. A cat named Morrissey. Arguments about whose turn it is to take Morrissey to the vet.

Their first anniversary is in eleven days and Ava has been staring at her phone every lunch break, typing 'first anniversary gift paper' and deleting it. The tradition says paper. The internet says: personalised star maps, custom song lyrics prints, 'things I love about you' scratch cards, a toilet roll with 'first anniversary' printed on it. She closes the tab every time feeling like she's shopping for someone else's relationship.

The AI did something Ava hadn't considered. Instead of searching for paper products, it looked at the paper already in their lives. Their apartment was full of it. The wedding invitation pinned to the fridge with a magnet from Salamanca Market. The handwritten note Ethan left on the kitchen bench the morning after they moved in: 'The cat likes it here. I think we're home.' A framed print of their vows in the bedroom — but it was a cheap A4 photocopy in an IKEA frame, the kind of thing you print yourself because you can't find anyone who does it properly. The AI flagged that one. The words were permanent. The presentation was temporary.

Chris and Nadia's daughter turned fourteen months old last Tuesday. She sleeps through the night now, which everyone said would change everything, and it did — now instead of being exhausted at 3am, they're exhausted at 8pm, sitting on the couch with the monitor between them, watching something neither of them chose because choosing requires energy. Their third anniversary is next Saturday. Chris only knows this because his phone told him.

He scrolled through their camera roll last night while Nadia was in the shower. The first year of photos was unrecognisable. Laneways in Fitzroy. A weekend in Daylesford. Nadia laughing in the passenger seat with her feet on the dashboard. Then the photos change. The last fourteen months are almost entirely of the baby. Nadia appears at the edges — half out of frame, or from behind, or her arm holding something. She's present in every photo and the subject of none of them.

The AI read the photos the same way Chris did, but without the guilt. It noted the shift and looked for what had disappeared. Before the baby, Nadia travelled light — a canvas tote that went everywhere. She had a weekend bag she'd bought at a market in Bali their first year together. It fell apart six months ago and she never replaced it. 'I don't go anywhere,' she said when Chris asked. She meant it practically. He heard it differently.

Jemima is sitting at the kitchen table at 6am on a Sunday because the house is only hers for another forty minutes before the kids wake up. She's been married to Marcus for ten years as of next Friday. A decade. She keeps saying it in different ways to see if any of them sound real. Their oldest starts Year 5 in two weeks. Their youngest has lost four teeth. Somewhere between the mortgage and the school pick-ups and the couples' dinner parties where everyone talks about renovations, ten years happened.

She opened Google and typed '10th wedding anniversary gift ideas for him.' The results were devastating. Tin camping mugs with '10 years of awesome' engraved on them. Aluminium wallets with coordinates. A tin sign that reads '10 Years: I Still Haven't Killed Him.' She closed the laptop, poured more coffee, and considered whether Marcus would notice if she just didn't do anything. He probably wouldn't. That's part of the problem — and part of the reason she wants to.

The AI went straight past the tin question. It looked at Marcus's profile — not the careful one Jemima had constructed, but the one buried in their shared photos. Marcus in his twenties, before the kids, had a turntable and a wall of vinyl. He DJed at a bar in the Valley on Friday nights. He wore headphones around his neck the way other people wore scarves. Then the records went into crates. The crates went into the study. The study became the playroom. The turntable is under the stairs behind the Christmas decorations. The AI found the turntable in exactly one photo — the day they moved into this house, Marcus carrying it through the front door with the same care he'd later use to carry their firstborn.

Wei and Anika met at a friend's housewarming when they were both twenty-six. He was a structural engineer. She was finishing her masters in marine biology. They bonded over being the only two people at the party who didn't want to talk about property prices. Fifteen years later, they talk about property prices. They also talk about their son's maths tutor, their daughter's netball schedule, the leak in the roof that Wei keeps saying he'll fix on Saturday, and whether the Thai place on Stirling Highway has changed its green curry recipe.

What they don't talk about, because it's the kind of thing that feels dramatic to say out loud when your life is perfectly fine, is that they miss each other. They live in the same house. They sleep in the same bed. They're in the same room right now, technically, while Wei reads this on his phone in the study and Anika watches something in the living room. But the last time they sat across from each other with nothing to manage, no agenda, no kids to coordinate — Wei can't actually remember. That's not a crisis. It's just a quiet kind of erosion.

The AI didn't look at their relationship for problems. It looked for rituals. And it found exactly one that still belonged to just them: every Friday night, after the kids disappeared into their rooms, Wei and Anika sat on the back patio with a bottle of something and two glasses. The glasses were mismatched — one was a wedding gift from 2011, the other came free with a bottle of wine from Dan Murphy's. They'd been meaning to replace them for years. They never had. The patio wine wasn't a date night. It was more like a debrief. But it was theirs.

Margaret is fifty-three. Ian is fifty-six. Their youngest moved to Melbourne in January for work. Their eldest has been in London for three years. The house in Battery Point, which used to be too small for four people and a dog, is now two people and a silence that has a particular quality — not unpleasant, but audible. Margaret has been noticing rooms she hasn't really stood in for years. The study. The back bedroom. The patch of garden under the kitchen window where someone planted lavender a decade ago and it just kept growing.

Twenty-five years. Silver. Everyone wants to throw them a party and Margaret says no every time. It's not that she doesn't want to celebrate. She just doesn't want to celebrate in a room full of people telling her how fast it went. She knows how fast it went. She was there. What she wants is something quieter. Something that acknowledges the weight of a quarter century without turning it into a performance. Ian says he doesn't want anything, which is what Ian has said for every anniversary, birthday, and Christmas since she's known him. He means it. She's going to ignore him anyway.

The AI looked at Ian the way Margaret asked it to — not as a husband of twenty-five years, but as a person she still finds interesting. And it found something Margaret already knew but hadn't thought to act on: Ian is a creature of absolute habit. Same mug every morning. Same walk along the waterfront. Same seat at the kitchen table where twenty-five years of mornings have started. But his watch — the one thing he wears every single day, the object that's closest to his skin for more hours than anything else he owns — is a $15 Casio he bought at Kmart in 2004. The band is cracked. The face is scratched. It's the only object in his daily life that he hasn't chosen with any care at all. He just never got around to replacing it.