The Poem I Read at My Best Friend's Wedding Instead of a Speech
I couldn't find the words. So I found the poem.
My best friend got married last year, and I was the best man, which meant I had to give a speech. I wrote the speech, the kind of speech you write when you are trying to be funny and touching and appropriate, and I hated it. It was safe and it was boring and it did not say the thing I actually wanted to say.
The thing I wanted to say was that I had known him for twenty years, that we had grown up together, that we had been through everything together, and that watching him get married was the happiest and saddest thing I had ever felt. I could not say that in a speech. A speech was too small for it.
So I found a poem. It was not a poem about friendship or weddings or any of the things a wedding poem is supposed to be about. It was a poem about two people who had grown up together, who had become different people, who had stayed the same. It was about the specific way a friend can be a home, the way a person can be a place you return to.
I read it at the wedding instead of the speech. I stood up in front of two hundred people and I read a poem that was not about the wedding, and I looked at my best friend while I read it, and he cried, and I cried, and the room was quiet the way a room is quiet when everyone is feeling the same thing.
Afterwards he hugged me and he said 'that was the thing I wanted to say'. I had found the poem because I could not find the words, and the poem had found the words for me.
The poem is framed now, in his hallway, next to the wedding photo. It is the only thing from the wedding that is not a photograph. It is the thing I found when I could not find the words, and the thing he keeps because it says the thing he could not say.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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