A wedding reading based on Matched

This last weekend, my nearest and dearest best friend, Rachel tied the knot! I was so thrilled when she asked be to be her chief bridesmaid but even more honoured when she and her new husband asked me to do a reading at their ceremony.

I wanted her reading to be something a little different.  So what did I come up with?

I'd recently finished reading Matched by Ally Condie.  I know many of you found the romance in Matched to be a little on the dull side and many of you didn't connect with Cassia & Ky's story but I really did.  I think it was the subtle-ness of it.  It wasn't in your face.  It was graceful and slow approaching and their romance touched me in a way no other fictional romance ever had.  So what I did was take all the parts of the books Matched & Crossed that moved me and merged them together.  I then lent Rachel the book and told her to read it before her wedding, which she did and thankfully enjoyed.

This is what I read to them just before they said I do.

~

“I'll climb into the dark for you," she said

"Are you waiting in the stars for me?” 

His lips move silently, and she knows what he said: the words of a poem that only two people in the world know.

“Do not go gentle.” 

So in the middle of all the noise, she points to the sky. She hopes he understands what she means, because she means so many things.

Her heart will always fly his name. She won't go gentle. And she knows he understands as he looks straight at her - deep into her eyes. 

His lips move silently, and she knows what he said: the words of a poem that only two people in the world know.

“I love you."

Lightning. Once it has forked, hot-white, from sky to earth, there is no going back.

It's time. They feel it, They know it. Her eyes on him, his eyes on her, and both of them breathing, watching, tired of waiting.  He closes his eyes, but hers are still open. 

She wonders what will it feel like, his lips on hers? Like a secret told, a promise kept?  Like silvery rain falling all around them, where the lighting meets the earth? 

Wind & rain blows around her and tangles her hair, leaves water on her face, makes her know that she is alive, alive, alive. There are moments of calm and pause as there are in every storm, and moments when their words fork lightening.

Even far away, he know it's her by the way her hair tangles with the wind and how she stands on the red rocks of the Carving.  She's more beautiful than snow.

"Is this real?" he wonders.

And she points to the sky.

His lips move silently, and she knows what he said: the words of a poem that only two people in the world know.

"Do not go gentle."

And for a moment on the top of that bare pain of rock he wonders if he should run behind or ahead - which is the best way to protect her - and then he finds they just run.  Side by side.”

Everyone has something of beauty about them. 

But loving let's you look, and look, and look again. 

You notice the back of a hand, the turn of a head, the way of a walk. 

When you first love, you look blind - and you see it all as the glorious, beloved whole, and then you see it as a beautiful sum of beautiful parts. 

And when you see the one you love as pieces, as why's, you can love those parts too, and it's  a love at once more complicated -- but much more complete.

Some things are simply created to be together