It’s hard to know where to begin with beautiful stories like this one. When you’re given the honor of documenting the most pivotal and intimate moments of someone’s life for many years, their story becomes an integral part of your own. I’ve been fortunate to follow Amanda’s journey closely throughout our ten-year friendship, and I treasure the bond we have as a result. Being acquainted with her background, her struggles, and her golden heart made it that much sweeter to watch her step into her own incredible happily ever after.
It was 2019. After ignoring repeated Facebook friend suggestions for a stranger named Josh with mutual friends, Amanda gave in to curiosity and clicked the “add” button. Hardly any time passed before Amanda got a message from Josh, curious to know if they’d met before. When Amanda responded that they hadn’t actually met, Josh replied that he’d like to change that. So meet they did, just a few weeks later. He invited her for a tour of the brewery where he was working. Remembering that night years later, they both distinctly remember how it felt to catch sight of each other for the first time from across that crowded room. They describe a strong sense of knowing. “It was magnetic,” Amanda says. “I actually swore out loud because I felt it so strongly.” Josh, for his part, was mesmerized instantly. From that day forward, the two of them spoke daily and spent every possible moment together. Since both Amanda and Josh are Scorpios, it became a running joke among their friends that their joining forces would “make the world explode”.
A few months into their whirlwind romance, the pandemic struck, and the landscape of the world changed. Josh moved in with Amanda to spend quarantine together, and they crammed what felt like five years of dating and getting acquainted into only five months’ time. Their kids became the best of friends, and the two families melded effortlessly into one. “It felt just like home.”
In early spring of 2021, Josh reached out to me with a covert plan. He and Amanda were planning to get matching “Scorpio squared” tattoos in April. But he had a bigger goal in mind: To amend his tattoo’s design slightly and use it as marriage proposal. I would volunteer to photograph their tattoo process under the guise of using the photos for my own photography project, and that way my presence wouldn’t be suspect. On April 17th, I met up with the two of them at O’Hana tattoo parlor. Amanda had her tattoo done first, and Josh followed. They both kept their tattoos covered until the end, when they would both show them to each other at the same time. It was at this moment that Josh got down on one knee and asked Amanda to be his wife. The answer was, of course, a tearful and resounding, “YES”.
We all knew that the wedding day would be magic, but none of us were prepared for the absolute wonder of it. When we arrived at the venue early that afternoon, deep storm clouds contrasted the fiery autumn colors of the surrounding trees, lit up by shafts of sunlight from the opposite end of the sky. Rain came and went at the most ideal times. Just as the ceremony came to a close and Josh and Amanda took their first steps as husband and wife, the sky unleashed a bevy of glimmering hail into the warm light of the evening sun, and a stark rainbow arched overhead. It seemed that the world did indeed explode that day, in the most unlikely and lovely way possible.
