Today was...full. This week has been full. I've tried to spend time journalling a little before I sleep.

Every day this week I've said "this is my last Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday... being single."

And now it's my last night. I have one more hour before The Day is here.

Tonight was the rehearsal. I felt like I was saying Goodbye to Childhood, goodbye to my relationships as I know them.

It's fitting that the song the Grandparents and Mothers walk in to is called The Adieu (by Felix Mendelssohn).

This wedding, this idea of a marriage (beginning tomorrow!), seems a mixture of the ecstatic and the surreal. It's the most bittersweet thing I've ever experienced.

All I can liken it to is the first time I left home when I was seventeen. My family took me to the O'Hare airport to send me off to Africa for five months. It was only five months but it may as well have been five years. I felt like I was relinquishing childhood, leaving my family for life as an adult. Excited as I was for the trip, I sobbed on the plane until it took off. The finality of it. Reading the letter from my mom saying how she was letting me go, so to speak.

My first rite of passage.

And now, my second. The one that feels most real. The one that comes with a ring and vows, a promise lasting until death.

This melancholia must seep through, must pour out tonight. I am not sad to get married -- I'm so excited that I can't find words or images to express myself. But I can't disassociate myself from the feelings of my parents.

Watching them as I practiced walking the aisle, hooking my arm through my dad's, hearing the piano as it announced my entrance.... Feelings--both vague and concurrently specific--rushed in, exiting only by tears.

My sisters just left the apartment. I nearly cried hugging them goodbye. I'm the first of us to get married...maybe that's why this is so weird.