20: One Night Only
Why I haven’t written about the wedding.
When it came time to put together our wedding ceremony, I tried to find all the old voice memos Lina and I had sent each other over the years. My phone is set to autosave them, specifically for moments like this. I thought maybe I would play for people some of the recordings from when the two of us were first falling in love. It seemed sweet. I couldn’t remember the details, but I remembered them being funny.
Though, when I looked through the phone the voice memos were all gone. Along with our entire text history before October 2024, when I’d had to reset my iCloud account to deal with an incredibly inane texting problem that I still don’t completely understand. The only solution had been to unplug my phone from its past and plug it back in. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless iPhone.
It was sad to lose those things. Because I thought they were saved on the phone, I’d not made an effort to actually remember them in much detail. I do remember some were in whispers, because Lina had been visiting her parents early on and didn’t like to talk loudly after 10pm. A lot of them had the unmistakable acoustics of a car, having been recorded in parking spots all over LA, sent whenever either of us was transitioning from one part of the day to the next. But what they said exactly? Who knows. Lina was really bummed when I told her. Much like I was relying on my phone to hold on to those moments, I think she was maybe relying on me a little bit.
I know how this looks. I spent a year writing a blog about planning a wedding and then refused to write about the wedding. “What about the blog?” friends and family are asking on an increasingly frequent basis. “What ABOUT the blog??” I’ll respond, defensively.
The truth is, I’m not ready to write about the wedding yet. Nothing bad happened. On the contrary, it was, unequivocally, the best day of my life. I have never felt so loved, have never been so proud of a partner and our partnership. I sat down and started writing about it just a few days after, but stopped a few sentences in. I tried again a month later. Same result. Now, here we are, almost three-months into married life and aside from some photos on my private instagram (and, you know, being married), there isn’t much immediate evidence that the year of planning paid off.
I thought it might be writer’s block. I worried I might just not have anything to say other than, “it ruled, wish you could have been there.” Then I thought maybe I was just exhausted, and with the wedding in the past that was where I wanted to leave it.
I now think it’s quite the opposite. The wedding still feels very present to me. I remember so much of it, so clearly. I remember Lina’s makeup, her hair, her gait walking down the many stairs in the building. I remember shaking her hand like an idiot when she got to the stage. I remember the feeling of walking into the reception and seeing my friend Katie light up with joy and throw her hands on my shoulders as if I’d just won a spelling bee. There is not an actor in this town talented enough to have faked the utter delight on her face. I remember the plate of food our friend set aside for us knowing we’d forget to eat, and my friends’ kids finding me four different times in different rooms to tell me they were leaving soon. I remember the kindness of the bartender, and the many ways my brother came through for me in a pinch, reloading my parking meter, finding me a 20 foot long HDMI cable with less than an hour to spare.
It is such a gift to remember this stuff so vividly. I still feel like I am reliving it every day. And there is a very big part of me that is not ready to hand it off to the cloud. I’m not ready to write it all down and give myself the room to not remember it. Perhaps my memory can be wiped clean just as quickly as a phone’s — maybe even more quickly. But right now it’s not about memory.
I suspect I’ll do a “Here’s all the stuff I learned!” post soon. Top 7 lessons or something. For now, I will say that the wedding was wonderful. I love Lina so much. I can’t believe she let us have a wedding, and then also let me write about it. I can’t believe so many people traveled so far to celebrate with us. I can’t believe we get to keep doing things like this for each other, and our parents, and our kids, all of us, for the rest of our lives. What a special thing.
Here are some photos:
