So, of course Ya-Ya's wedding was gorgeous. Basically I bawled the whole entire time, and the priest actually made a weird comment about how happy for her I looked (heart is apparently stuck on sleeve). If she wants to, Ya-Ya might come over here and do a recap, once her photos are in. But I think it's not my place to recap. My whole day was bawling, being happy for Ya-Ya and Ya-Ya Man, and Fixing Shit Before She Knew It Had Gone Wrong, which is basically the Best Woman job description. There were some minor disasters and some pretty funny things, and I'm not going to tell you about them, because all she needs to know is it all came out perfectly and the wedding was gorgeous. What I will share is my toast for them, because I think it turned out okay. You have to remember that this was a Disneyphile wedding, replete with carriages and fairy-tale references of all sorts, which Ya-Ya did in a very sweet and tasteful way. So here it is.
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Ya-Ya and I spent the first years of our friendship waiting for our lives to begin—staring out of windows, driving aimlessly around our suburban neighborhood, and sitting in parks. With the pavement hot under our bare legs we would laugh and dream, our stomachs tingling from the infinite possibility you feel at seventeen, when the world is open and nothing is decided. We had a black notebook we passed back and forth, full of dreaming, but also full of frustration. The eighteen- to 24-year-old-men of our hometown had thus far failed to impress us in a wide variety of ways. The pages of this black notebook are laced with fiercely independent jabs, promises that we needed no men in order to be happy, and assurances that if our dreams of love didn’t work out, Ya-Ya and I would sit together in the old folks’ home, two tiny old women, cursing belligerently and smuggling in cigarettes and liquor.

This makes it all the more remarkable, the thing that Ya-Ya wrote in the margin, shining there like a beacon of hope in a sea of worried cynicism. It came from Little Women, a story so saccharin we despised most of it, a story dedicated to marrying off all four of its female protagonists, fierce or no. And even still, here is the thing she wrote in the margin: “You only need one, if he’s the right one.”

This simple phrase reveals Ya-Ya for who she is. Romantic, even in a sea of terrible first dates. Wise, knowing that a real life lay beyond our frenetic, seventeen-year-old rants. Hopeful, in that small seed planted in the desert of first-heartbreaks. Kind, to offer such a ballast, even though it would take a decade and a few false loves before it proved true. Brave, to hold tight to the idea of true love, such a radical notion.

And true love is funny, because for years and years, it was no easy thing to find. There turned out to be plenty of that endless possibility we felt that summer, but also rivers of tears, mountains, fire, canyons, and other obstacles. When it came, it happened suddenly, effortlessly. Ya-Ya and Ya-Ya Man fell into each other as if beckoned by something so simple and irrefutable as gravity. When she called to tell me, it was as if the world had always been that way.

My darling Ya-Ya and Ya-Ya Man, as you stand on the edge of the life you will make together, this is my toast to your love, true love—something even grander and more miraculous than a fairy tale.