In the other timeline, I would have officiated my two best friends’ wedding by this time today. I would have worn this really beautiful red lace dress and cried a lot and would be beautifully tipsy at this point in the afternoon.
That will all happen, of course, just not today. I’ve promised Lin & Cara I would save all the good material for the wedding in the future, but . . . I am still going to take a moment and acknowledge how beautiful it is that they are my friends. That we love each and that they love each other and that three midwestern children ended up at Emerson College and somehow fucking found each other, saw each other, and have kept understanding each other through the messiness and joy that has followed.
My first memory of Cara: really the emails we sent in the summer before we met in-person. We were soon-to-roommates and I sent the most obnoxious messages about my small town and how much I loved my boyfriend and how I was buying matching pink dorm items and she decided to give me a chance anyway even though I made her take the top bunk without asking.
My first memory of Lin: playing on the same Quidditch team, the Park Street Pulverizers. We wore bright orange and ran around on broomsticks and though I didn’t know them — not really until we spent a transformative semester as roommates abroad the following year — I knew them enough to want to be roommates. And then we dipped out of the castle tour to get dibs on bikes and the rest is history.
I know today is not what the two of them expected, but they are getting good food and making margaritas and spending time together (and with me) and a postponed wedding just means more days to celebrate the two of them, including today.
It is frightening sometimes how much I love both of them. It is one of the greater blessings in my life that they are in it. I haven’t written my officiant speech for the future yet . . . I guess I better be careful and hold in the good stuff. But I’m not worried — there’s so much good stuff.
With Love,
Natalie