I am getting married in four days.

And I am picking up the best friends in the world tomorrow.  I will have lunch with my father.  I will see my brother.  I will probably have a hard time and a good time, probably both at once and I will feel a little confused but steadily content.

I will spend a day celebrating all that is feminine in my life.  And then a day decorating and preparing.  A night of eating and toasting with our family and close friends.  On the last evening, my sister will sleep with me and we'll whisper the nighttime hours gone.

Then we'll start the day.  I'll get ready in a room filled with girls and dresses and boots.  We'll smile for pictures, we'll say how much we love each other, how beautiful we all look, how exciting and wonderful it all is.

I'll take my dad's arm.  He'll walk me to where he is waiting for me in front of the window, surrounded by our friends and we'll promise ourselves to the other.  Our fathers will pray.  We'll all sing.  And then we'll move, the two of us, down the aisle, down the stairs, and somewhere in the middle of all of those moments I'll have shifted into a new name and a new role and I'll have grown too, in front of all of those people, at the front of the barn in my gathered and tucked dress and they'll have seen me.

Born witness.

And now I am a different woman.  And now I am a wife.  And now I am leaving my family, creating a new one.  And now I will have a new way to dream.

And now it will not just be I.

It will be us.