Denver I Do

Odd ThoughtsTravel

Jul 1

After I walked up the side of a mountain and gasped in the razor-thin air; after I ate an all-veg meal from my parents' large garden; after I skated Lafayette park in ungodly heat with Ben and some Midwest road warriors; after I stood outside watching the night sky flash like a pink strobe light with the thunder rolling around in my rib cage; after I smelled fresh rain on hot dirt; after I drank too much wine and played very many matches of ping pong, which is an odd game requiring infinite finesse ... after all that, I watched my big sister get married in her backyard in the city of Denver in the state of Colorado.

If you don't believe in love as a politico-religious institution, then you're in good company. But all you gotta do is watch closely and see the way two people can look at eachother with flashing eyes to know that there's some real-love stuff in this universe (although it gets confused with lots of other of things, I think).

Aaanyway, Melissa and Sarah climbed up in front of a small crowd of people and read some lines they'd written about each other—talked about being a family, about knowing themselves better in the face of each other, about overcoming their own deficiencies in order to form a more perfect kind of whole. Some of us trembled and gripped our hands over our hearts. Some of us blinked away big tears. Say what you want—this lay-your-souls-bare shit is pretty heavy when it's real. The rest of the night was a blur of champagne and ganache. And for real, can you believe we live in a country/world where peeps won't give these two the right to enter into the social contract that is marriage?!