People tell you a lot of different things when you tell them you’re getting married. By the time my own wedding came around, I’d heard some say it was the best day of their lives, and others say it was the worst; some described it as relaxing, while others had post-traumatic stress flashbacks over their memory of it. What all those people failed to realize was, there is no way to put your own wedding day into exact words, especially not words that would ease the mind of someone who’s never been there before. My own wedding was a mixture of everything I’d ever been told it would be. Magical, fun, sad, stressful, irritating -- you name it, but more than anything, I would just choose to call it fitting.
Sarah and I had never been a conventional pair. In life, we always traveled upon roads that had others raising their eyebrows, and we liked it that way. We enjoyed the perturbed stares, the questions, the speculation taking place behind our backs where people thought we wouldn’t notice. Therefore it was only appropriate for us to have a wedding that would disturb people, even if that wasn’t the original intention. For every family member praising us, there were a hundred strangers complaining that we were too young, or at least I was -- that we were throwing our careers away. I didn’t understand where they were coming from. I didn’t understand at all how my marital status had become a factor in whether or not I was successful as a musician, but I let it go. I didn’t care what other people thought. I knew what I wanted, and that was Sarah. In the end, onlookers who didn’t know me bothered me a lot less than the people who did, especially Sarah’s parents, whose only role in our wedding seemed to be to oppose every single decision we made.
Where we wanted a modest, outdoor wedding, her father had taken the liberty of renting out an unnecessarily massive venue. Sarah and I settled on red and black for wedding colors, but had to change them because her mother was already sold on gold and blue, and her decorations had already been purchased. Mama Emily even took care of picking out a dress she just knew Sarah would love, even though it was white, and Sarah had specifically stated she wanted red. At some point, they’d also bulked up our guest list, but not before scolding us for how selective we’d been initially. Kevin and Emily Hudson, bless them or damn them (I truly didn’t care), had become the most annoying people I’d ever met.
The night before the wedding, Kevin took me out for drinks while Emily dragged Sarah to some kind of bachelorette party I had absolutely no hand in. “Ya’know, Casey, I like ya’ kid… but I have to say this, and I’m gonna make it very clear…” Sarah’s parents were from South Carolina, and it showed most prominently in Kevin, who rocked a handlebar mustache and a white cowboy hat which he’d set down on the bar. I always wondered what he must have done for a living, but I didn’t like him enough to ask. “If you ever hurt ‘er, I got a shotgun and a bullet with your name on it, you hearin’ me?”
I listened with my chin in my palm, twirling my empty shot glass around. He raised his eyebrows at me, prodding me for a response, but it took me a minute to conjure up anything nice. My jaw was aching from the tension of my restraint, and I wanted to roll my eyes, but instead I took a deep breath and looked away all together. “Loud and clear, pop,” I simply said, not feeling the need to justify myself to him. Anyone who knew me knew I was crazy about Sarah. Anyone who knew me knew I would sooner die than hurt her.
On our wedding day, I still wasn’t feeling any magic. Sarah and I had barely even seen each other since her parents got in, and while we’d been elated to make the announcement in the first place, I looked into the venue that morning feeling only dread as I watched Emily scrambling around to get the finishing touches on everything, followed closely by our unexpected flower girl Olivia - Sarah’s little cousin, whom we’d established in one of our brief moments together was the least annoying member of her whole family. I looked to each side of the podium stationed front and center. To the left, Sarah’s family took up three rows of seats. To the right, my family - tiny in comparison - took up only one. Behind them was the guys and Byron, and further back were a select few of our mutual friends.
My heart fluttered. I felt sick to my stomach thinking about reciting vows in front of all those people we didn’t even invite. They didn’t deserve to be there watching us. After witnessing every one of them put Sarah in distress at some point that week, I decided not a single one of them - save for Olivia - deserved to be a part of our moment, though such a decision didn’t really matter when they were already sitting there, taking up our space, absorbing our energy. I wanted to go back to bed. I’d have sooner ditched my own wedding and taken Sarah down to the courthouse or something to save us from having to walk down that aisle.
“Gettin’ nervous yet?” Kevin came up from behind. I flinched when he pat me on the back. I’d been preoccupied staring at the ugly decorations, silently mourning the visions Sarah and I had that never came to fruition. This wasn’t the wedding we wanted. This wasn’t a wedding we would have ever put together, yet it was ours, and it would be a stain on our history forever. Was I nervous? Immensely, but not about getting married. What had me nervous was doing it in front of a bunch of people I didn’t know, or like.
“I’ve been that way,” I mused. Talking made me more aware of how nauseous I was, and as soon as that realization hit me, so did the dizziness and light-headedness that could only be associated with throwing up. I leaned on the door to keep my footing. My chest was throbbing. If I didn’t know any better, I’d have thought I was suffering a heart attack.
Kevin looked at me and laughed, and I wanted to punch him for it, but I wouldn’t have had the strength. “I can tell, you look like a ghost!” He pointed.
“Kevin, leave that boy alone,” Emily scolded him. I had no idea where she even came from, but for the first time since she’d flown in, I was grateful for her presence. “We’re almost ready to go.”
“Actually - I’m sorry, can we like… hold on just a minute?” I asked. I had to get out of there. I didn’t care if we ran late, they could wait on us.
Emily stared at me. I couldn’t tell whether her concern was genuine or not, but I didn’t really care. I was already starting to back away from her. “Sure. Are you okay…?”
“I’m good,” I insisted. “I’ll be fine, I just need a sec. Um, do you know where the bathroom is?”
Kevin was snickering behind Emily. It was everything in me to keep from lunging at him, but I’d already used most of my strength pushing myself off the wall, and I was saving the rest to make it to the bathroom.
“Uh yeah, third door to your left. Hurry now!”
I didn’t answer, I just took off down the hall, to the third door, but in my daze I managed to confuse my right and left, and walk right into Sarah’s dressing room. She shot up from the vanity. There was a woman helping her who started trying to shoo me away. I knew the rule. I knew it, and I’d just broken it. “Aw man,” I covered my eyes and turned my head while the weird woman continued yelling at me to leave.
“No, no, no, no, no, it’s okay. It’s okay!” Sarah finally halted the commotion holding her hands out. “It’s okay, I hate that rule anyway. Can you give us a few minutes, please?” She asked the woman. “Tell everyone we’ll be out in a few.”
“But your makeup isn’t finished.”
“It looks great. Just give us a few, okay?”
“Okay…?”
The woman leered at me as she passed by. I probably wasn’t giving her a particularly kind expression either, but I wanted her out as much as Sarah did. The moment I got a look at Sarah, that lady didn’t even matter to me. No one outside mattered to me. I was completely captured, stunned into silence by the way the light came through the side window, illuminating the pearls embroidered into her dress. That had to be the magic everyone talked about, and I was mystified.
The longer I stared, the more bewildered I became by how almost otherworldly she looked. In that moment, I remembered the reason I was there. I remembered why we put up with her parents’ weird demands, and complete overhaul of our original plan. I remembered why I got down on one knee a month before, in front of an entire audience. It didn’t matter to me how ugly our wedding was, I was just happy to be with her. In the end, I won; I had a whole lifetime and then some to make up for this one crappy week that we’d probably forget about anyway. We didn’t need this ceremony; it was only a small part in a monumental picture, or series of pictures, and it didn’t match up to all the other moments we’d shared together, or would share together. I felt a weight off my shoulders upon my decision to just let it go - to think of it as just an obstacle along the way to our eternity.
“Can you close the door?" Sarah said, jerking me back to my senses.
“Sure.” Once it was closed, she plopped back down in her chair and promptly burst into tears. In the entire time I’d known her, I’d only ever seen her cry a few times. I really didn’t want our wedding to be one of those times, unless it was happy tears, but that was far from the case.
“Casey, I hate this…” she blurted out, covering her hands with her face. “I hate this wedding, I HATE this dress, I hate those people… This was supposed to be the best day of our lives, and it isn’t, I hate it.”
My knees felt weak. My stomach was still in knots, but I couldn’t worry about it while she sat there bordering on hysterics. In fact, I was glad I’d turned the wrong way, because her pushy makeup artist could have never consoled her the way I could, and didn’t even deserve the opportunity to try. Once again, the universe pulled us together at the perfect time. ”Hey…” I whispered, coming in to kneel down in front of her. God, I hated seeing her cry. I was trying to smile, but my own eyes were starting to tear up, which was something only Sarah Hudson - soon to be Caverly - could do to me. I reached up and took her hands, pressing our foreheads together in order to close out any outside influence that could obstruct her ability to hear me. “This day sucks. This whole week has pretty much sucked, I know, but you know what?” I decided to share my realization with her, in the hopes that it would ease her mind. “It doesn’t matter because this is only one week we have to spend doing this versus a whole life we can spend together. None of this changes how I feel about you or how excited I am. We always had to fight for what we wanted, right?”
Sarah took a moment to process what I said, then nodded, “I guess so...”
She always got stubborn when she became flustered. I could tell she wasn’t really hearing me, so I trudged on, hoping something would stick. “Think about it. To get into music, we had to fight, right? To get together in the first place, we had to fight it out with - well everyone. This isn’t any different. We have to fight through this crappy wedding to be together, so let’s put on our helmets and fight, okay?”
She nodded again. That time, I was sure she was actually listening.
Finally, I brought myself to smile, for no other reason than I wanted to see her smile too. I wanted her to be okay. “…And I know you really hate your dress, but I think you look absolutely stunning.” At that, we finally shared a laugh. She pulled her hands from mine and grabbed my face, and when she kissed me, it felt like we’d gone back in time to the first night we met. We got lost there, and despite everything I just got through telling Sarah, part of me wished we could have stayed there, but we had people waiting on us. “I love you,” I whispered. “We’re gonna get through this, I promise.”
She was still smiling, nodding her head while wiping the tears off her face. “I love you too…” Sarah looked to the side and suddenly her eyes went wide. “Casey! You know how we can fight this, right?”
She grinned. This was where our lack of convention came into play. This was what I was waiting for - what I was holding onto when everyone said it would be an enlightening day. “I’m listening.”
“Well you see, my aunt…” Sarah got out of the chair, leaving me to go to the other side of the room where there were a few gift bags piled up. She rummaged through them and pulled out two bottles of wine. “Must have known we might need some helmets.”
It was perfect. To an outsider, maybe it looked ridiculous for us to sabotage our own wedding, but the thing was, it wasn’t our wedding. It was her parents’ wedding we were sabotaging, and we’d just found our secret weapon. “I love it,” I said, and in a half an hour - fifteen minutes past show time - Sarah and I stumbled through the door, onto the gold aisle, littered with little white flowers we both hated.
Everyone looked back at us when the door flew open. Emily was out of her seat, presumably on her way to come check on us. To the right, Jacob and Isaiah were the only ones in the venue laughing. “Oh, no way…” I heard Jacob saying through my own fit of laughter. “It’s okay! It’s okay!” I hollered. Byron was sinking in his seat, pretending not to know me, which made me and Sarah laugh even more. “It’s okay,” I felt the need to repeat, just in case the officiant up front hadn’t heard. “You can start.”
“Yeah, get the music going!” Sarah shouted, stumbling into me.
“Sarah,” Emily hissed. More people were starting to laugh, successfully outnumbering Emily and Kevin.
“Are you sure?” Our officiant looked at Kevin instead of us. Kevin was furious; everyone was furious, and their appalled expressions were all the confirmation my drunken self needed to know we’d won.
“Doesn’t matter if he’s sure, we’re sure, and it’s our wedding!” I yelled out. It took Sarah and I five minutes to get down there, not because we were really too drunk to walk, but because we couldn’t stop laughing. We couldn’t stop celebrating. When we finally made it to the podium, we stared at each other like children who’d gotten away with a major plot to break their parents’ rules. Sarah was red in the face, and the tears forming in her eyes were undoubtedly joyful ones this time.
The uncontrollable smiling was making my face hurt but I couldn’t stop. She grinned and leaned against my chest. “Hey, is my face red?” she whispered.
I pressed my lips against her temple. Somehow my smile grew wider at her question. I still don’t know how my face managed such an expression. “It’s beautiful,” I answered, wrapping my arms around her shoulders. Even amid the utter crappiness of our ruined wedding, I never wanted to leave that spot. I never wanted to let her go. We weren’t just standing at an altar, we were standing in the middle of a war zone, where we’d emerged the victors of what felt like an endless battle. I wanted to celebrate that forever. And just as quickly as I thought that, it occurred to me that what I actually wanted was to leave. What I truly wanted was to celebrate our victory where no one else could see us. I wanted to hold onto her without anyone there to pull us apart.
“Marriage is perhaps the greatest and most challenging adventure of human relationships. No ceremony can create your marriage --”
“Hey, can you just like… skip to the ‘I do’ part?” I interrupted. The guy looked at me like I was out of my mind. I felt out of my mind, and I loved every second of it. I could feel the burning stares of Sarah’s entire family in my back, but they didn’t realize they were fueling me.
“Um… well sure, I can… I can do that, uh,.” He was flustered, flipping through pages to get to that part of his speech. I made a note to apologize to him later, if I remembered. In fact, there was a long, long list of people I would have to apologize to, but it was more than worth it. “Do you, Sarah, take Casey to be your husband?"
Sarah and I parted only enough to look into each others eyes. We stared at each other for a moment, not saying anything, which eventually turned into an unexpected contest we both lost due to uncontrollable laughter. She grabbed my face once she composed herself. “I do!”
Our officiant looked concerned by the answer, but probably not half as concerned as the rest of Sarah’s family. “And do you, Casey, take Sarah to be your wife?”
People told me so many things about getting married. They tried to prepare me for getting emotional and frustrated. They told me it would be the best day of my life. They told me it was enchanting and magical and warm. I’d come to find that a wedding was a mildly toxic mixture of all those things, but in mine and Sarah’s case specifically, I still chose to just call it fitting. Was it the wedding we always wanted? Far from, but it was ours. And just like we’d tackled every other obstacle, we tackled this one too. When I looked at Sarah, beaming from her perseverance, there wasn’t even an hint of hesitation. “I do.”
