My friends Sxip Shirey and Coco Karol were married yesterday. I wrote and read something for them at the wedding party.
Afterwards a few people found me and asked me what I'd read and where they could find it, and I explained I had written it for Sxip and Coco that morning, and then they asked if they could read it again.
"I have a blog," I told them. "And it is dusty there and really, I should put it up. So look on my blog." (And now I'm blogging I realise I need to do blog about the TV series we are making of Good Omens.)
This is what I read.
...
And that's all I know about love.
Afterwards a few people found me and asked me what I'd read and where they could find it, and I explained I had written it for Sxip and Coco that morning, and then they asked if they could read it again.
"I have a blog," I told them. "And it is dusty there and really, I should put it up. So look on my blog." (And now I'm blogging I realise I need to do blog about the TV series we are making of Good Omens.)
This is what I read.
...
This is everything I have to tell you about love: nothing.
This is everything I've learned about marriage: nothing.
Only that the world out there is complicated,
and there are beasts in the night, and delight and pain,
and the only thing that makes it okay, sometimes,
is to reach out a hand in the darkness and find another hand to squeeze,
and not to be alone.
It's not the kisses, or never just the kisses: it's what they mean.
Somebody's got your back.
Somebody knows your worst self and somehow doesn't want to rescue you
or send for the army to rescue them.
It's not two broken halves becoming one.
It's the light from a distant lighthouse bringing you both safely home
because home is wherever you are both together.
So this is everything I have to tell you about love and marriage: nothing,
like a book without pages or a forest without trees.
Because there are things you cannot know before you experience them.
Because no study can prepare you for the joys or the trials.
Because nobody else's love, nobody else's marriage, is like yours,
and it's a road you can only learn by walking it,
a dance you cannot be taught,
a song that did not exist before you began, together, to sing.
And because in the darkness you will reach out a hand,
not knowing for certain if someone else is even there.
And your hands will meet,
and then neither of you will ever need to be alone again.
and then neither of you will ever need to be alone again.
And that's all I know about love.
Labels: Coco Karol, love, sxip, Wedding Poem