Chapter Twenty - Wedding Plans, Meltdowns, and Magic

CHAPTER TWENTY

Wedding Plans, Meltdowns, and Magic

IT STARTED WITH a Pinterest board and a Google Doc titled:
“We Might Regret This Later”

We had no budget.
No planner.
No clue what “rustic-industrial-chic” meant, but apparently it was a thing.

She wanted twinkle lights.
I wanted tacos.
We compromised by arguing about chairs for three hours.

And that’s how the planning began.

Some days we were adorable.

We’d stay up way too late picking first dance songs, googling weird venues, and arguing over whether a donut wall was cute or tacky.
(Spoiler: we got it. It was both. Everyone loved it.)

Other days?

It was tears.
Snapped pencils.
Her sobbing over guest lists.
Me spiral-Googling “how to elope without making your mother cry.”

There was one night she yelled, “I hate this!” and I thought she meant us.

She didn’t.
She meant the napkin colors.
But it cracked something open.

We sat on the kitchen floor.
No music.
No distractions.
Just us.

And she said, “I don’t want a perfect wedding. I want a real one. One where people laugh too loud and your cousin gets too drunk and my uncle wears crocs again.”

And I said, “Okay. So let’s stop performing. Let’s just throw a party that feels like us.”

After that, it got easier.

We made dumb decisions that made sense only to us.
Had a playlist of ‘90s R&B and sad acoustic covers.
Let her little cousin be the flower boy.
Wrote our vows in the Notes app at 2 AM.

Nothing went according to plan.
But every choice felt like a secret handshake between two people who knew:

This isn’t about centerpieces.
It’s about choosing each other out loud.

We got through it.
Barely.
Together.

And somewhere in the chaos, we found the kind of magic you only get when everything almost falls apart… and you choose each other anyway.