Bathroom Monologue: The Wedding Volleys

No one in the chapel knew that the bride wasn’t crying. From afar, with her sniffling and red eyes and breathing hitches, she seemed the most emotional woman in America for a few minutes. This was all actually an allergic reaction to her sister’s vegan breakfast burrito, but they couldn’t tell, especially when she had the veil up.

Her father, who had eaten at the IHOP, did not know, and he soon pulled the antique hanky from his breast pocket to dab at his eyes over his pride and joy.

Now her mother was the extreme type. Extremely strong, for instance, during all the wedding planning and rehearsal dinners and such, with a proud lower lip and steely gaze. Yet she was also extremely sympathetic, and thus extremely compromised when both her only daughter and her only husband teared up in tandem. So soon her dams broke and she became the proper most emotional woman in America for a legitimate stretch of minutes.

The priest, who was both an emotional softy and a cardiac patient, looked away from the red-eyed bride and to the bawling mother, and he himself took a sharp sob for such love in life.

Those were the variables one needed to cover to watch weeping consume the dearly beloved host. The groom’s aunt, who basically raised him, basically fell out of her chair crying for her little man. In consoling her, both of her natural sons, aged 4 and 6, took to crying, perhaps a little more for never getting to see their cousin again, since they didn’t understand that Oregon is actually quite close to Washington.

It was that volatile an arena. You could not discern what set off the ensuing weepers. There was no good reason for the aged cowboy in the back pew to begin squirting tears. No good reason for the bride’s boss and her husband to clutch at each other and murmur about their wedding day and cry in-between unseemly open-mouthed kisses. You had that sort of thing happening, and then of course the groom’s fraternity brothers started crying for suppressed laughter at the hazing they’d put him through later.

It was the single loudest audience for a wedding the church had ever seen. If you paid close attention, which you couldn’t have since if you were there then you lost your shit, you would have noticed the groom was the last person to cry. What finally got to him was a secret he kept for five anniversaries, until his wife confessed about her breakfast burrito fiasco. If she was embarrassed at her tale, she was rankled to learn at what had set him off: he was good at faking it, and did not want to seem left out.