The Wizard at the Wedding

I’m at a wedding in Tuscany, sitting beside the dessert table. My heels lasted an hour before I ditched them behind a cypress tree. There are violinists playing Cornfield Chase, and a thousand candles flickering in the balmy summer night.

People tell me fairytales only exist in books, but here I am, standing barefoot next to an ancient castle in the midst of my oldest friend’s Happily Ever After. The kind of love people fly across the world just to witness.

“There’s someone I need you to meet,” The groom says. He pulls me through a crowd of suits and glittering gowns, up a too-steep hill (thank god I ditched the heels).

There’s a man in a grey suit with black framed glasses. Before we can be introduced, he turns around and narrows his gaze like a hawk.

“You’re a writer,” He says in a thick British accent. “You’ll never finish that trilogy until you learn to unlock your anger.”

My eyes bulge out of my head. I turn to my friend, who only laughs and says, “Have fun.”

I know what the man means. Without my anger, my writing loses its edge—the sharpness, the clarity, the chutzpah. It’s like a song stuck on a single high note.

“All great writers are rebelling against something in their stories, so what are you rebelling against?” He asks me.

I close my eyes. There’s only one honest answer.

“The way our world has forgotten how to fight for love.”

A wedding was the last place I expected to find a psychic. We talked for three hours, and he feels like a mythical character handing me a prophecy and a letter to Hogwarts.

It’s both relieving and unnerving when someone sees the parts of you that you’ve been blind to.

I never wanted to be a love poet, but I can’t think of a better subject to be a student of. To remind the world that love, above all else, is equal parts worth fighting and surrendering our swords for.

Convenience is the death of deep, lasting intimacy. When we stop needing to go out of our way, our muscles of care atrophy. We forget how to court each other, make an art form out of loving one another. And I don’t just mean romantically.

Isn’t it an honor to be inconvenienced? To drive your friend to the airport at two in the morning, and send them off with a hug. To fight rush hour traffic and bring them soup when they’re sick. To tend to the person who makes your heart skip a beat. To say, your dreams are mine to support, your burdens are mine to also carry.

I have found the most worthwhile things in life are, frankly, a total pain in the ass. Writing novels. Finding untouched gems in nature that require impossible hikes. Building devotional relationships. None of this is convenient, and that’s what makes it sacred.

It reminds me of this Rumi poem,

“With passion pray.

With passion make love.

With passion eat and drink and dance and play.

Why look like a dead fish in this ocean of God?”

Why the hell not make massive effort to romance everyone we care for? Why look like a dead fish in this ocean of God?

I wonder what the world would look like, if we remembered not only how to be each other’s lovers, but as Liz Gilbert once said, each other’s Champions. Not just in romance, but with everyone who lives under the shelter of our love.

Xx Your friendly neighborhood scribe.