Here Comes The Bride.

Evn, yesterday, reminded me that a wedding isn't about the two people involved so much as everyone else who's attending. Trothwy said, "It's YOUR day."

I am the Bride, and tend to lean towards Trothwy's view.

I am the Bride. Despite being recently divorced and handfasted to my Bridegroom for two years, I feel very...new. Shiny. Like this is a whole new ballgame, even though I can't imagine much changing between myself and the Husband/Bridegroom.

But there's something different. Maybe it's, as I said to him over something silly a few nights ago, that he taught me to dream again. I can dream, now, about a little barn and five or so safe schooling horses, and maybe giving lessons on the weekends at a place where I call the shots. I can dream about living somewhere else which is NOT godsdamn Costa Rica* (don't ask). I have someone, now, who genuinely appreciates every little thing I do. Someone who dug me a garden (which is being decimated my moles from below and deer from above, but I digress).

I survived a financially ruinous divorce in which I lost Land and stability and pets, and came out, as Deb said I would, feeling bulletproof. And with this official, legal marriage, I feel even newer. I mean, come on - I'm 42 and have been married, if not legally, to the man I'm marrying on Saturday for two years already. Why did buying plastic cups in pretty spring-party colors at Sam's make me feel so fluttery? Why am I starting to think that I need some sort of veil for him to lift on Saturday? Why am I thinking that a ban on sex until Saturday might be both incredibly hot and remarkably symbolic?

The things he asks of me are so few, and so simple, and really come down to two things - that I love him, and that I be myself. Really myself, not some domesticated version that's easier to handle and explain to the neighbors and doesn't inconvenience anyone.

Well, that and tuna casserole. He loves it when I make my mother's tuna casserole. And cookies. And that tater tot-poblano-roasted corn-cheese gunk. He adores that shit.

Back to me.

Maybe this whole Bride thing is because I've never done a wedding by myself before, and while his family certainly has helped, we've done a lot of the logistics. I'm wearing a dress I haven't fit into in eight years. It has cherries on it.

How symbolic, right?

All the kidding and flippancy aside, this is momentous. I will walk through the yard on Saturday to the altar where Trothwy and Evn and my little horned Bridegroom wait (if only he could wear a set of small antlers). And when everyone finally goes home, we will be alone for the first time as legal spouses, Bride and Bridegroom, as much archtypes as people. I have no idea what happens after that, but I suspect it will be wonderful and interesting and something I never even saw coming.

*I have nothing against Costa Rica. I just also have no more desire to live there than I do, say, London or Finland.