Flashback to my best friend’s wedding in Chicago six years ago. That’s right, a New Years Eve wedding. 15/10 recommend. 

My ridiculously terrible boyfriend got angry at me because I refused to participate in the bouquet toss. I didn’t see the point: there was a 0% chance I was ever going to re-marry, and I certainly wasn’t planning on spending much longer with him. I begrudgingly stood up, grabbed my fresh beer and trudged to the back of the dance floor, just to keep the peace. While I stood there talking to a happily single guest, still aggressively still not participating in the ritual we both declared foolish, something slammed hard into my foot. Somehow, my bestie the bride managed to fling this bouquet – backwards and over her head – and hit me with it. 

I felt sick to my stomach as I looked over and saw a satisfied smirk spread across my shitty boyfriend’s creepy little mouth. But I picked up the bouquet, and performed a short comic bit for the other wedding guests, holding it toward them and groaning at my misfortune while they laughed. On my way off the dance floor, I grabbed an open bottle of champagne and made a beeline for the photo booth, ducking the son-of-a-bitch who’d badgered me into this mess in the first place.

Once home in D.C., I forgot about the bouquet I’d caught. I kept my New Years resolution and broke up with that awful man soon after, a process that he dragged out for as long as possible; it only ended with a restraining order and changing my locks. I vowed to never date again and made big plans to discreetly sow my wild oats all over the District.

But somehow despite the odds, just one year and two weeks after those flowers crash-landed on my neon pink stilettos, I found myself with another bouquet.

That Easter Monday, I re-connected with an old friend from my time in New Orleans. A casual brunch somehow became a date, which became a weeklong visit, which became him driving 500 miles to see me again the next weekend. One month later we went camping and fell in love. Matching tent tattoos came two months later. I proposed to him three months after that casual brunch, in the same seat at the same New Orleans bar where we first became friends. He said yes. The next day, my ex-husband was so thrilled to learn the news that he picked up my new fiancé and spun him around in a circle; “you deserve to finally be happy, with someone like him,” he grinned. 

On January 14, 2017, Russell and I married each other in front of a mural in a West Philadelphia parking lot. There were no guests or officiant, just a photographer. We wrote our own vows; a copy of his hangs framed in our living room. From my iPhone, I played the song “The Party” by Regina Spektor. I wore the same dress from my first wedding, which I altered myself to accommodate the baby girl growing in my belly. 

And this time, my bouquet came from Whole Foods. The superstition came true: I was the first guest from my best friend’s wedding to get married.

It’s hard to believe that we’ve been married five years. It feels like yesterday and six lifetimes ago, all at once. And six years ago? I could never have imagined the life I have today. I live in Michigan with my kind, supportive, gentle (and sober!) husband, with our smart, funny children and a future career in medicine. It isn’t what I planned, but I love the life we’ve built together. 

Shout out to that bouquet for choosing me.

Tierra

A malcontent with a heart of gold, Tierra is a first-year medical student, former high school teacher and history PhD candidate, plus mom to four of Bebe’s baddest kids. She curses a lot. Tierra is a DC native but lives in southwest Michigan and will happily exchange writing (hers) for cash (yours).