Grace's Wedding (aka The Post I Would Have Written)

photos taken by Sonia, Jules, Alicia (with Sonia's phone and Jules' camera), and a nice stranger at a cafe in Byron (with Sonia's phone). I have no idea how to correctly credit photos...

I’m feeling particularly uninspired to write at the moment, which is partly good and partly bad. It’s good because my exams are next week, and the less time I spend here explaining how flustered I get these days when I come across a tin with no ring pull (I panic for a full minute or so before remembering that this is the one job our neglected can opener was created for), the more time I can spend getting flustered over how few questions from past papers I’m currently able to answer. It’s bad because I was hoping by now to have put up a heart-warming post about my friend Grace’s wedding in Byron a couple of weekends ago. Last week I forced myself to sit down and make the most of an opportunity to collect the sentences that had been rattling around in my head, however my 30 minutes of effort produced nothing more than the modern-day equivalent of a bin filled with and surrounded by scrunched-up paper (an empty Word document, basically).

The post was going to be about amazing friendships and silliness and laughter and shared faith and conversations about everything from lipstick to apocalyptic literature. I wanted to try to describe the feeling of peace and joy and blessing that covered the wedding, and the bride who looked so stunning and blissful that I was brought to tears more than once just by looking at her. I thought I’d also attempt to articulate that feeling of sad-happy upon realising at the reception that she was sitting at his table rather than ours, and wonder how a simple speech act in the church earlier in the day could in a moment change nothing much and yet everything.

I was going to throw in a paragraph or so about the food (which was was so good it demanded to be enjoyed with groans and closed eyes) and the music (which was so good it kept us on the dance floor for longer than I’d have thought possible given the recentness of the meal and the lateness of the hour and the highness of the heels). I‘d include the story of how we’d cut out a photo of Liz and stuck it on a ruler so that she’d be able to be part of the day despite being many miles away in Uganda, and that an aunty at the wedding had asked quietly, was she our dead friend?, which made us all laugh – “No, no, no!! We wouldn’t dance around with a dead friend on a stick!”

Throughout all of this I planned to weave Sonia’s fascination with an excerpt she found in the Women’s Weekly (which she’d bought simply because it had Hugh Jackman on the cover) from a book called Proof of Heaven, about a neurosurgeon’s spiritual experience during a coma. The post would have ended with a comment about how I’d had such a beautiful time with such beautiful sisters and such beautiful food in such a beautiful location that I had no problem believing that this guy had tasted heaven; I’d say exactly the same thing, and I’d been conscious for all of it.

It would have been one of the best posts I’d ever written. 

Alas.