I gave a wedding speech once — her best friend’s —
prepared for two weeks, cut it down to three minutes,
delivered the edited portrait at the reception
while the whole real speech stayed in my head.
The whole real speech was about her, not the couple —
or about her as evidence of what love can be —
I couldn’t give the whole real speech in public
so I gave the acceptable one and kept the true one.
She sat at the table looking up at me
while I gave the speech I’d prepared for company —
and she knew, the way she always knows,
that the speech she was hearing wasn’t all of it.
After, when we were driving, she asked:
what were you actually going to say up there?
And I told her, badly, without notes or preparation —
the speech I’d been editing for two weeks in reverse.
What I told her, badly, was this:
watching you love people is an education.
You love without the hedge, without the exit strategy,
without one foot already out the door.
You go all the way in every time,
and when it costs you something you don’t call it a loss —
you call it what it is, which is the price of being someone
who takes the love seriously enough to risk it.
She listened in the car while I reconstructed it —
the speech that didn’t make the reception,
the speech I’d been too careful to deliver publicly —
and she was quiet for a minute when I finished.
Then she said: I show up because you make it worth showing up for.
And I had to take the car off the highway for a minute,
find a spot, sit with what she’d just said —
which was her doing the thing the speech was about, right on cue.
The couple whose wedding it was are still together —
I’ve seen them since, they seem like it’s working.
Whatever speech I gave them at the reception,
whatever three-minute speech I’d prepared —
I hope it helped a little, hope it said something useful.
But the speech I kept was mine, for her, internal,
and I finally gave it badly in a car one evening,
and she gave it right back, as she does, in one line.