A custom anniversary song about your actual story

Paper: the first year, still thin enough to tear. A song is what you'd write on it if the paper were bigger. Put in the first place you lived and the thing about them that surprised you.

Cotton: soft, and it gets softer. Year two is when the novelty wears off and something better starts. Worth naming: the first ordinary week you'd happily live again.

Leather: made to take wear. Three years in, something has gone wrong together at least once — that's the verse, not the roses.

Wood: roots, five years deep. Wood also warps and ends up in a drawer. Put in where you were living in year one and what's different now — five years is the sweet spot, real enough to have a story and recent enough that you still remember the details.

Tin and aluminium: durable, and unromantic enough that most people give diamonds instead. Ten years is long enough for a decade to have a shape — the move, the hard year, the thing neither of you saw coming.

Crystal: clear, and it catches the light. Fifteen years in, the story has a middle. Name the version of them you fell for and the version you're with now.

China: fine, and you actually use it. Twenty years is long enough that the kids — or the friends who were there at the start — belong in the song too.

Silver: the first year that feels like a milestone, and usually the first with a party. A song earns its place here because it's the one gift that can be played to the room.

Pearl: made slowly, out of an irritation. Thirty years has earned some honesty — the years that were hard belong in it as much as the good ones.

Ruby: deep red, no subtlety left. Forty years in, the details are the gift — what they still say, what they still do, what nobody outside the two of you would notice.

Gold: fifty years, and everyone has already given the framed photo. A song can hold the names of everyone who came out of those fifty years.