Wedding thoughts: All I know about love

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.

...

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 that's all I know about love.

Labels: Coco Karol, love, sxip, Wedding Poem

Yes

At the end of the wedding ceremony last night, our friend Jason Webley (who got ordained on the internet, and wrote a wonderful ceremony and married us) read this poem by e.e. cummings:

i thank You God for most this amazing

day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything

which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,

and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth

day of life and love and wings:and of the gay

great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing

breathing any-lifted from the no

of all nothing-human merely being

doubt unimaginably You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and

now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

I found myself mouthing along with it, like a prayer: I'd closed the last issue of Black Orchid with it, over twenty years ago, and it was still there in my head, saying yes in the best possible way.

Amanda and I married on Sunday night (actually and legally, this time) almost on the spur of the moment. The handful of people who were at the wedding were the people we were going to have dinner with on the Second of January anyway. They just got a little more than they were expecting.

The evening was hosted and improvised with love and gusto by our friends the Chabon-Waldmans, and Daniel Handler played the accordion when Amanda came down the stairs wearing the dress she had worn as a human statue, so long ago. Rosie Chabon, cutest creature on earth, was our flower girl. Mexican food was eaten, and pie, pie in enormous quantities.

Probably getting married in a friend's parlour, with a dozen friends around who weren't really expecting this but who threw themselves into making a wedding for us out of nothing, and a daughter and a son lending their support and love, isn't how everyone would plan a wedding. But we'd been engaged exactly a year, and it felt incredibly right to improvise a wedding as we went along. So we did it. And were as happy as any two people had ever been.

And then today, after a night together, Amanda went to Australia, and I went home to the cold. We won't see each other for ten days, until we meet in Tasmania; and while everything else just happened and wasn't organized, but just fell perfectly into place, I've decided there's a lot to be said for organised honeymoons that immediately follow weddings. Losing your bride immediately smacks of carelessness.

Labels: A Wedding, Wedding Poem, yes-and

post-wedding post

I'm online and accessing the internet using my clever new phone.

So, it was a wonderful wedding -- I think, the best I've ever been to. I did my best man thing fine -- I made a speech in the middle of the wedding (which is where best man speeches come in Spanish Weddings, I am told) and I didn't lose the rings, which is good, on both counts.

I gave Mark and Irma a few fun gifts, but the best of them was a blank book for the people at the wedding party to write or draw things in. And because I don't think I have a connection speed that'll allow me to upload any photos, I'm going to post what I wrote on the first page of the book.


This for you, for both of you,

a small poem of happiness
filled with small glories and little triumphs
a fragile, short cheerful song
filled with hope and all sorts of futures

Because at weddings we imagine the future
Because it's all about "what happened next?"
all the work and negotiation and building and talk
that makes even the tiniest happily ever after
something to be proud of for a wee forever

This is a small thought for both of you
like a feather or a prayer,
a wish of trust and love and hope
and fine brave hearts and true.

Like a tower, or a house made all of bones and dreams
and tomorrows and tomorrows and tomorrows

Labels: A Wedding, Mark and Irma, Spanish Weddings, Wedding Poem