The Poem I Read at My Own Wedding Rehearsal
I couldn't write vows. So I wrote a poem.
I couldn't write vows. I tried, for weeks, and every version was either too formal or too personal or too much like everyone else's. The vows were the thing that was supposed to be the most important part of the wedding, and I could not write them.
So I wrote a poem. Not about love, not about forever, about the specific way my wife holds a cup with both hands, like the warmth is the point. About the way she laughs at her own joke before she finishes it. About the way she leaves the light on in the hall because she knows I will be home late.
I read it at the rehearsal, the night before the wedding, to the people who were closest to us. I didn't read it at the wedding; the wedding had the vows, the legal words, the ones that are supposed to be the most important. The poem was the thing that was actually important.
She cried. I cried. The room was quiet the way a room is quiet when everyone is feeling the same thing.
The poem is framed now, in our hallway, next to the wedding photo. It is the only thing from the wedding that is not a photograph. It is the thing I made, the thing I wrote, the thing that proves the day was real in a way a photograph cannot.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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