These final weeks of planning a wedding are like being on drugs. The euphoric, blissful highs are always bound to be followed by crushing, empty comedowns. For every item you cross off the list, for every minor victory, something else goes wrong. Found your wedding shoes? Hooray! Oops, your hair fascinator broke.* These things do not happen in one successive, unbroken line of isolated incidents, of course. No. While this and this are happening, that and that are also happening, in addition to those and those. And so it goes, a thousand little triumphs and defeats in one day, like cake batter being perpetually folded in on itself. And gradually these disparate instances rise, gather energy, and fuse into a singular force; a rushing wave that crests but doesn’t break. You’re just swept along with it until it suddenly dawns on you that, like… everything influences everything else. All the objects and all the people and like everything … it’s all one big thing. Working together! We have the same hopes and dreams and experiences, man. We’re all riding on this wave. One love. One fabric woven together. You know? Like one big blanket draped over the universe. It’s like … all connected, man.

Drugs? What drugs? We are talking about weddings, here. Jeez, guys.

To further illustrate my point, I turn to: bullet points. WHAT’S UP NOW, UNORDERED LIST? Here, I present to you a personal, non-comprehensive list of recent cringe- and yay-inducing moments.

  • Earlier this week, at the final meeting with our caterer/day-of coordinator, I experienced a giant and all-encompassing meltdown. Why? I am still not clear on this. To the best of my recollection, we had to change some minor things on our setup schedule, which meant that I had to change some of our wedding documents, and for some reason I interpreted this new information as the most horrifically impossible set of tasks I’d ever faced. I cried for days, guys.Our poor caterer, having apparently been through this kind of thing before, responded to my festival of sobbing by presenting me with two cupcakes and the largest glass of red wine ever poured. When I mumbled repeatedly that I was sorry, he waved it off. “Oh, honey,” he said. “I have seen things.”
  • My undergarments! I finally got them in the mail!!!!!
  • My undergarments! I haven’t had time to try them on. No, really. I am just going to go for it and hope it works out for the best. This has the potential to turn ugly.
  • We wrote our vows!
  • Oh, wait… nevermind. These vows aren’t going to work.
  • We have halfway rewritten our vows!
  • Oh, shit. What day is this wedding again?
  • At last, after agonizing over the various options, we have finalized the guest seating chart!
  • Huh? You mean those people aren’t coming to the wedding anymore?
  • Yesssss! We made a detailed schedule for our wedding party, families, and photographers! We’re so organized.
  • ALL THE FUCKING SCHEDULE DETAILS CHANGED. AGAIN.
  • We finalized the rentals!
  • What? The DJ is now demanding that we rent a large umbrella to shade him? Buh?

On so on. Something serendipitously solved, only to have it snatched from our grasp. You get the picture.

In other news, the first wave of our family arrived today. I am… stunned. I cannot believe this is happening. It just dawned on my yesterday that all these people were coming into town, and that this was actually happening. Unaware much? I don’t know. Sometimes I can burrow down so far inside of myself that I’m not remotely aware that the world continues to turn outside of my skin. Right now, today, I feel like I’m emerging from a darkened movie theatre into blinding afternoon light. I’m not sure where I am, or how I got here. All I know is that there’s a plotline about planning a wedding still echoing inside my skull. The me of tomorrow feels like a film character instead of my actual life. I’m excited to see how this story pans out.

And nervous. Nervous as all damn hell.

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* Not that anything like this, um, happened to me, or anything.