Bride

I was born in a small town in central Illinois.  At age 9, my family moved to the Chicago area.  My dad, David, works in the telecom industry and my mom, Doris, is a paralegal at a large downtown law firm.  I am the oldest of three girls, and my sisters and I are very close.  My sister, Alli, and I both attended the University of Illinois (she was 2 years behind me) and have shared love for shopping and chocolate!  My youngest sister Meg is a senior in highschool – and a star athlete!After I graduated with a degree in Psychology, I moved back to Chicago and started working in the psych unit in a hospital.  (That’s where I met Brandon! – more on that later.)   In my free time I enjoy singing and playing guitar (although not for an audience!) and decorating my new apartment.  Lately, I’ve been consumed with wedding planning – I never imagined what effort goes in to planning one perfect day!  Even if everything goes wrong, the only thing I really care about is Brandon, and I can’t wait to spend the rest of my life with him!

And then Jason walked by—the beautiful man with the amazing green eyes.  He was so shy that he actually sent someone else over to request my phone number, but as soon as she clarified “the guy with the cute eyes,” I began scribbling digits.  He called that night, and asked me out on a date.  He said that it was the headphones that drew him to me, the way that I was lost in music.  I would later find out that he was a musician (as was I).  One date became two, then three, then we began to realize something serious was happening. 

He was different than anyone I had ever met, much less dated.  He was both magical and familiar, conservative and freethinking, and I proceeded to do what I always did: use as much blunt-force honesty as possible to see if he would be frightened away easily.  He was used to a different type of woman, someone who was a bit more sheltered than I was, and someone who was far less opinionated.  I made him smoke a lot of cigarettes those first few months of dating, as he sat in his car on his driveway, debating whether or not to go on another date with me, trying to figure out if this was a good thing that was happening in his life. 

I knew he was a good thing for my life.  I didn’t realize how much I knew it until, after running into someone I once dated, I saw how strikingly different Jason was from anyone I had ever known.  He encouraged me to take care of myself rather than destroy myself, and didn’t accept my feeble attempts to hide behind masks.  I think I fell in love the moment he heard my story, discovered my emotional scars, and didn’t flinch.  I later referred to him as the one who saved me, because he pulled me out of the depths of cynicism and self-destructive habits, and made me look at myself in the mirror with the same honesty I pushed so harshly onto everyone around me. 

From the day we met, it was barely a year later when he asked me to be his wife.  Our relationship and marriage has had the expected ups and downs (as any relationship should), but it is a dance—we may grow apart for awhile, fight, be immature and selfish, but we always find ourselves back together, embracing, and moving as one.  I have come to understand the meaning of love as it was meant to be.  It is grace, a necessary redemption, and a beautiful transcendence from the ugliness we all have inside of us. 

Someone once told me that you find the most happiness in life in the small, seemingly insignificant things.  There is wisdom in that statement, because I found my happiness from sticking stickers onto brochures.sa posuere.