I’ve been married before. I thought the second time around would be easier. I promised I wouldn’t cry. But promises are meant to be broken.
Yes, it killed me keeping this secret from everyone for so long. However, even as my whole life is projected onto digital screens all over the world everyday, there are just some tiny moments I want to hold onto a little while longer, without feeling the need for them to be exposed.
Varick and I exchanged vows in a small church within the hometown I grew up in last May 8, 2017. I had a simple white dress, nothing out of the ordinary while he wore his best hundred dollar suit probably purchased from H&M from his cramped closet in our three-story walk up, one bedroom place.
I was so nervous though it was such a simple ceremony. No band, no choir, no guests, no fuzz. Just a few candles, our parents, our siblings and pure, uninterrupted simplicity and silence.
We did this for practicality’s sake. If you are to have a destination wedding, the ceremony becomes null and invalid without proper documentation from the church or the court. But most importantly, we did this for us. We want our guests to remember our wedding forever as we will. But we wanted a moment embodying just us two, uninterrupted. We wanted to be selfish and have this moment as pure, untouched and simple as it is. We wanted the moment to be ours. Having heard from friends who’ve been married before us, weddings are beautiful yes, but weddings have another side to them that no one else but the bride and groom see. A nightmare (We’ll touch on that later on). If you smiled because you were once a bride or a groom, you feel me at a hundred.
We had our wedding in Bali nine months after our personal ceremony, this time with 50 of our closest friends and family. The wedding was thousands of miles away from home, across continents and oceans, on a 24 hour timezone difference, tucked in the heart of Bali, at the edge of its cliffs, overlooking the Indian Ocean. We chose Bali for so many reasons. A few of them in my past blogpost (here).
We didn’t want a thousand flowers, gold accents and expensive crystals. We wanted an elevation of our simple ceremony back in May and bring that to a new level in Bali. We wanted to highlight our love, nature’s elements and mother nature as our only accessories.
To bring in the element of fire, we chose to bring our families together within the heart of the equator. To bring in the water element, we selected a unique way to walk down the aisle: Through a glass walkway on an infinity pool, over the water. To bring the element of air within our ceremony, we chose to be daring and have the ceremony begin where the glass aisle ended: At the edge of the cliffs of Uluwatu, 250 feet up. Talk about taking our guests’ breath away. Lastly, we used all natural decorations for our entire wedding and wedding reception to honor the element of Earth. All decorations used by our florist and wedding decorators were only biodegradable, all-natural and eco friendly.
We decided to write our own vows for the ceremony and I’m so glad we did. I had thought that doing this the second time around together would be easier, but it as just as nerve-wrecking, scary and intense. But there is always a sense sanity in all the madness. After all, that’s what love is. You take steps based on acts of faith, not knowing if the ground is going to give in, but walk through it anyways.
… To be continued into the wedding reception blogpost coming up next.