A Real Wedding

He stared back out at me, with his arms wrapped around this other girl all dressed in white.
She'd picked a strapless dress. It was perfectly complimented by a sheer veil with lace trim. A bouquet of pink roses were bunched in her left hand, her right was pressed to his chest.
I hadn't even met her. Though I'm sure it would have been perfectly inappropriate if I had.

I hate pink. I will never do a wedding in pink. Brandon Cole's wife had chosen a pink wedding. And I mean it was PINK. It looked like a Barbie doll had thrown up all over everything.
I don't think I even want a wedding. Every time I go to one, I get so freaked out I can hardly breathe. I mean, I've performed in front of hundreds of people and done the news in live television broadcasts, but the idea of walking down an aisle and having everybody ooooh and aaaah in approval, frankly, disgusts me.

Its so damn cliche! If I know I love someone and they know they love me, who cares if everybody backs me up by showing up at a wedding where I pledge my undying love in front of them just so they can nod and say NOW they're official. NOW its real. They did this BIG thing by getting MARRIED and NOW its final.

I just don't think weddings mean anything these days. They're all for show. They're just something the brides have been dreaming about since they played with their sickeningly pink Barbies and dressed their Kens up in tuxes for the "big day." Weddings are the result of two people settling on the outcome of their young lives. Weddings are negociations. Weddings are promises for the forseeable future. Weddings say, "YOU GUYS SAW US DO THIS, SO WE ARE NOW HELD ACCOUNTABLE." Weddings make me freak out.
I could just never be that hokey.

Russ Walker kept laughing it up with his wholesome, skinny, brunette on my screen. They held hands and laughed into each others faces. They cut the cake, which must have also been HILARIOUS.

I could still remember going to his sister's wedding when I was nineteen. The wedding had been tiny. It was held in an enormous church, and the groom's parents had disapproved of the bride's religion. They showed up, though. No one cried. Everyone drank non-alcoholic punch and watched the two of them dance awkwardly surrounded by parents, aunts, uncles, and other related old folks.
Terror had ripped its way through my gut throughout the entire ceremony. It felt wrong! How could some ceremony that everybody has done over and over and over like a patterned tradition really prove anything about the way you loved someone? Who was the ceremony for? Was it for the bride and groom? Was it for their parents? Was it for the government, so they could recognize the union? What was the purpose of the whole thing? Was it really supposed to feel like the Cinderella stories from the Disney movies I'd watched? Was it supposed to be lovely and right and like the heavens opened up and the stars were aligned and all that? I just didn't feel any magic. I felt a little... sad.

The only other wedding I'd been to was my aunt's when I was thirteen years old. She'd married a business owner, and she was supposed to be set for life. I watched her tearfully walk towards him down the aisle. He smiled back at her, not awkwardly at all. The place was full. It was beautiful. We blew bubbles at them as they ran outside toward a black limousine.

It was three years later before he turned out to be a crook and did jailtime. Needless to say, they divorced. Russ's sister toughed it out for five years and two children before she divorced her mama's-boy of a husband.

Since those two weddings, I've witnessed my former best friend's wedding, Brandon Cole's, and most recently a friend of a friend's. The last three haven't ended in divorce or anything, but I never feel all butterflies-and-rainbows when I see a bride walk down an aisle anymore. I feel scared. I feel scared because I don't know what it means anymore.

I mean, I know what I want out of a marriage for myself anyway. I want trust. I want so much trust that an ocean of crazy-bad couldn't separate us. I want love. I want the kind of love that doesn't get lost when the money runs out or when somebody gets a bad haircut or eats onion soup before going in for the kiss. I want faith that we are both working toward the same points in our lives, simultaneously. I don't want a debbie downer, I want the faith that says we can get there. No matter how long it takes, or how many times we have to go to plan B, I want to know that we both have faith in getting there. I want someone to talk to, who will talk to me, too. I want a romantic. I don't know if I'll find all these things. But it seems like its possible.

Still, if I do, I'm not sure I'll be rushing out to share it with everybody else when it happens. I don't think I want or need anyone's approval. Its a bond between God, and me, and whoever I marry. I don't need a whole church full of judgemental people nodding their heads because of our happy tears and PDA.

I always said I'd cry when Russ got married. I said it would break my heart. See, for four years I'd thought that stupid skinny girl was gonna be me. But now I realize that seven years has passed since those four ended, and I don't even know who Russ is any more. We are two completely different people now.
Still. I can't stop looking at that girl in that dress with that hideous bouquet and thinking to myself that I could have been right there. I could have been so different.

But. Obviously. I'm glad I'm not. I want more than Russ was. And I don't even want a real wedding.