You spend the whole rehearsal worrying about the wrong things. Which side the boutonnière pins to. Whether the string quartet will finish the walk-in before the bride reaches the front. I stood at the back of the tent yesterday and watched a bridesmaid iron a crease out of a tablecloth for four full minutes, hunting it down like it mattered.
I used to be that person. I want to be clear about that. I am not standing above any of this.
Here is the thing I can't put down anymore. Everyone in that tent is breathing. Two hundred people, and the only reason any of them can stand there and cry about two people holding hands is a band of gas maybe sixty miles thick wrapped around a rock. From where I was, it's a blue line at the horizon so thin you'd swear someone drew it with a single pass of a pen.
Thinner, proportionally, than the shell on an egg. That's all of it. That's the whole supply.
And they spend it on this. On a father clearing his throat twice before he can get the words out. On an old woman in the third row who mouths the vows along with them because she still knows hers by heart. On rice, or bubbles, or whatever they throw now.
I don't think weddings are small. I think they might be the least small thing we do. Two people stand up inside that impossibly thin blue line and promise to keep paying attention to each other for as long as the breathing holds out.
I noticed the groom's hands were shaking. That's the part I'd tell you. Not the flowers.
His hands.