I’m writing this at 2:45 a.m. having been visited by my old pal insomnia. Even after reading a fourth of Khaled Hosseini’s new book and watching four episodes of 30 Rock, I’m still wide awake. I blame the wad-up ball of emotions and stress that has taken up residency inside me thanks to the launch of the app my team and I have been working on for nearly a year. (Authors and graduate students, I get it. I totally understand what it’s like to dedicate so much of your time to a pursuit only to put it out there and pray that it’s either universally praised or that no one sees it.) Here’s to hoping that ball of stress unwinds itself now that the app is out there.
Anyway, being wide awake at the moment perfectly sets me up for a Flashback Friday, which the Modern Love Machine gently reminded me a week ago is something I haven’t done in a while. Specifically he said, ‘You haven’t done a Flashback Friday in a while,’ but I know he meant I hadn’t blogged in a while, and thank you for that reminder, dear husband.
The MLM and I will be celebrating our second wedding anniversary on Tuesday, and as I lay awake in bed just a bit ago, my mind went directly back to the hours leading up to our wedding day.
As you’re preparing to actually live your wedding day, you’re well aware of the fact that it’s going to be a very, very, very long day (in a good way, of course). Obviously getting a good night’s sleep ahead of that is a very, very, very good idea. Because insomnia and I have been bedfellows regularly enough, I knew heading into the eve of our wedding day that I did not need to leave a good night’s sleep to chance, so I opted for some Tylenol PM — generally my sleep aid of choice — but threw in a melatonin for good measure.
No, it did not work. I can count on one hand the number of nights in my life where I got not even a single minute of sleep. Three of them involved participation in my college’s 24-hour Dance Marathon fundraiser. One involved a trans-Atlantic flight. The other was the night before my wedding.
Usually at some point during a night of insomnia, I get up, grab a cold drink of water or milk and then try to read somewhere that is not my bed in an effort to short-circuit my brain a bit. For some reason, I just completely gave into the insomnia that night and laid awake thinking, mainly getting hung up on the notion that I was living one of the biggest milestones of my life, one of those days that is forever being made the subject of rom-coms and dramas. You know that scene in Father of the Bride when Brad Paisley’s wife and Steve Martin are outside in the middle of the night shooting hoops? I was wide-awake, lying in my childhood bed, living that night, except without Steve Martin or basketball.
At some point in the night I did reach for my cell phone. Maybe I tweeted something, but I know I searched YouTube until I found just the right recording of this song, which I then listened to on repeat with a few listens of “Wedding Bell Blues” and “One Less Bell to Answer” thrown in to break it up a bit. The Fifth Dimension is now inextricably linked to the memory of my wedding eve.**
The universe gave me two wedding-related gifts, for which I will always be grateful: I was not hungover after my bachelorette party when I very much should have been, and I successfully made it from the 8:30 a.m. wedding day trip to Dunkin Donuts with my BFF to the trip to Dyer’s on Beale Street with the MLM 17 hours later without so much as needing a nap. And I managed to enjoy the whole thing.
**To be clear, those songs did not represent my feelings about marrying the MLM, nor do they represent how I feel about him today. It’s just that, you get in a mellow Marilyn McCoo mood in the middle of the night, it can be hard to undo.
P.S. The outfits in the One Less Bell to Answer link are fantastic.