here is the golden close of love

I was woken up by a stomachache this morning before the alarm went off and at first I spent a few minutes stressing out about everything we have to get done today before driving off (we have to finish our playlists and make CDs and our ceremony isn’t done being written!) and freaking out because it’s really hard to believe we’re leaving today. But as I drifted back off to sleep, I had this slideshow running through my mind of all these sweet moments of our relationship from the beginning until now. Those early emails we sent each other and how he would knock me off my feet with his words. How I used to come home from our early dates and be so excited to call my girlfriends and talk about it that I’d grab my phone and throw myself on my bed with one shoe on and one shoe off and lay there grinning like an idiot.

The first few moments of half fear, half wonder when I realized just how seriously in danger I was, that this was something big. The first time Husband to Be told me he loved me, out in a field under a starry summer sky. The first time HtB heard me say I loved him – he was hunched over a toilet in a friend’s bathroom, sick from drinking too much and several drunken friends were outside the door, advising me to help him throw up by sticking my finger down his throat.

The drunken friend who kept loudly proclaiming at a party how much I’d “blossomed” since meeting HtB and the random woman who came up to us at a concert last summer and asked us if we were married and told us what a cute couple we were.

Raiding a friend’s fridge while they were out of town and HtB asking me if I was his girlfriend as we polished off the rest of a strawberry pie. All the weekends we spent doing a whole lot of nothing, making lounging around in the grass an art form. Our whole amazing week in Maui. HtB continuing to ask me to marry him every time we’ve been in a different state or country.

We were getting ready for bed one night and he said “I wish I could marry you and then get hit over the head and forget who you were and meet you and fall in love with you and marry you all over again.” Totally goofy and utterly sweet, and so quintessentially him.

Just the other morning, HtB snuggled up to me and reminded me that “Soon, you’ll be waking up as my wife.”

There’s been so much more sweetness in the past 2 years and 3 months than one post could ever contain and there’s a thousand times more than that to come. There were so many heartaches over the course of planning this wedding but none of those matter anymore. In the lottery of love, I won so big.

This is the end of one long journey and the beginning of another and I can’t wait to see what happens.

This next week and a half is going to be simply amazing.

See you on the other side, Ray.