Koala looked at the finger with the ring. It still felt unfamiliar. “Turtle”, she intoned, “did anything change?”. “Huh”, answered Turtle, awakening slowly from a short afternoon nap in the sun, “what do you mean?”.
Koala pondered this for a while. Yes, what was it that she meant? Finally arriving at a conclusion, she explained “Well, you know, the other Koalas asked me if I felt any different now that we’re married, and I told them no. You’re still the same Turtle and I am still the same Koala, and that’s all I want. But then they asked me why we married in the first place then. And I didn’t know how to answer.”
Turtle frowned. Sometimes the other Koalas made him really furious for a Turtle. His frown was as wrinkly as it ever got. “You know, I think that sometimes people say things just because they miss something that other people seem to have, and they need to tell themselves that it’s really not that great. We have each other, and you are great for me. And marrying you felt like the rightest thing to do.”1
Koala pondered this too for a while. Then she lit up. “Next time anyone asks I know what to answer! I’ll tell them to go fu-”—that’s right, marrying Turtle felt like the best thing to do for her too.
Footnotes
1. He knew that “rightest” wasn’t really a word, but it felt like the appropriatest word in the moment.