I’m trying to get used to this ring on my finger. I keep thinking it’s a band-aid, that I should avoid getting it wet. Berck keeps tapping his against the steering wheel, this foreign, hard body, looking out of place among his thick fingers. The only thing weirder is looking down at my own hand and seeing one similar to his, a sign that we must come as a matching set now. Otherwise, we could simply be in the car, on another road-tripping adventure.

It hasn’t quite sunk in that we’re married now. We’ve wanted to be with each other for so long… we HAVE been with each other for so long… and now it’s official, and we’ll never have to say goodbye again.

I still can’t decide if the ceremony was worth all the headache that went into it. It was certainly worth the effort, just not the dealing with all the parties involved who seemed to keep getting their feelings hurt at every turn.

I woke up in the middle of our wedding night, my new husband stretched out peacefully in the king beside me. I couldn’t go back to sleep–I’d drifted off around 8:30 the evening before, I was so exhausted–but I didn’t really want to slip back into unconsciousness. I lay there, grinning in the dark, pondering all the previous day’s events, replaying everything that happened, and letting the realization sink in of how wonderful it all was.

I was never one of those girls who had been planning her wedding since the first day she realized people have them. I didn’t even want to get married until Berck talked me into it. The only clear idea I had about a ceremony is that I wanted it outside. When our mothers independently suggested beach weddings to us within a week of each other, that was the thing to do. The details just seemed to fall into place. (By falling into place, I mean my mom asking me if I wanted such and such and me saying, goodness no! until I had to come up with something I did like.)

But what we ended up with was beautiful. It was everything I didn’t know I’d always wanted.

I wonder how many memories I can jot down before they’re confined to the myriad of time-slices captured by every amateur digital photographer in attendance… the effort I put into keeping my teeth from chattering as the wind bit through the velvet of my dress, the surprising sharpness of the wine as I gulped more than my half of it, the way Berck held my fingers as he swore something neither one of us could recall the words to later on…

Afterward, when we finally had some time to our own, we looked at each other and laughed and asked ourselves what had we done. We’d thought about this decision long and hard, right? We’d made up our minds a long time ago, yeah? We’d had time to think this over before the planning just got crazy and our time was no longer our own… didn’t we?

We snuck out after most everyone had left. As we checked into the Courtyard Marriott in our wedding gear, the clerk grinned and asked us how the wedding was.

“It was perfect,” I said.