To call a person a mosaic is not to suggest they are fractured or incomplete. On the contrary, it is to acknowledge a beauty that can only be achieved through the careful assembly of countless, disparate pieces. My wife is not one thing; she is a thousand things, and the woman I wake up beside today is the glorious sum of every tiny, colored shard of experience, mood, and memory that has been pressed into the wet clay of our life together.

“Nothing,” I say. “Just looking at the mosaic.”

For years, I thought I knew her. I could have sketched her portrait from memory with the confidence of a master: the precise curve of her jaw, the way a single stubborn lock of hair always escaped her bun, the constellation of freckles across the bridge of her nose. I believed that love was a kind of perfect, unbroken photograph—sharp, singular, and whole. But time, that patient and mischievous artist, has taught me otherwise. Love is not a photograph. It is a mosaic.