Continued from earlier.

Warning: Rambling Ahead!

This past weekend the first of the many upcoming weddings, the joining of Nathan and Dareke, took place. I served as one of Nathan's groomsmen. During the rehearsal and the day of the wedding, I took around 150 pictures and shot several minutes of video. The plan was to take more pics at the reception and then come back home, edit together some of the video, choose the best of the shots I took, and then upload the results to vimeo and flickr. That is not what happened. As it stands now, I can't really bring myself to look at what I shot. Perhaps in another week or so, but for now I feel a strong twinge of embarrassment whenever I even think of that day. Here is my story.

Friday was a fairly laid-back day. I drove around with my mom in the early afternoon, doing some errands with her. I paid a traffic ticket, got my hair cut, picked up my tux, and ate lunch. I arrived at the church about an hour early for the rehearsal and caught up with some old friends I hadn't seen in a while. Finally, the rehearsal time arrived and everyone showed up. My mom was directing the wedding. She walked us through the order of service, arranged who was walking in with who and counseled us on how quickly to walk.

It was actually kinda fun. We all stood and joked around and the groomsmen made inappropriate comments, as guys are wont to do when gathered together in such situations. The actual wedding rehearsal part was mercifully short, since the pastor did not go through every word he was going to say during the service, instead summarizing the longer portions. I had asked Nathan the night before if this was gonna be a short wedding or if it would be one of those interminably long weddings with a song for every portion of the service. He gave me a blank look and said he did not know, but when I asked my mom the next day she said it looked on paper like it might be a long-ish wedding. After the rehearsal, we all ate dinner and I shot more pics and video.

The next day we all arrived early and dressed in our wedding attire for the pictures. Again, all the groomsmen sat around on the first few rows and quoted movies and made jokes through the whole process. We went downstairs where sandwiches and little bottles of sweet tea were laid out for the wedding party. (Aside: The bottles of sweet tea left when I came down were sweetened with Splenda. This is the South, and such things should be illegal.) I wasn't feeling hungry so I just grabbed a bottle of tea. More waiting followed until the family and friends began to arrive and I, in my duties as groomsman, began to seat people.

This, of course, is all mundane and likely boring to read about. Which, it might sound odd to say, is kinda the point; nothing really happened in the day or two leading up to the wedding. No problems or foul ups or major issues during that time. If I were more superstitious I might have thought that odd or worrisome, but my mind did not go in that direction.

I was nervous as the wedding approached. Not overly so, but just the normal, "Oh God, I have to go stand in front of a large group of people for some undefined period of time, I hope I don't trip or faint or anything like that." type of nervousness that normally goes away when you actually start to do whatever it is you are nervous about doing. I walk out with the bridesmaid assigned to me, trying to remember to go slowly and not trip her or myself. The remainder of the wedding party entered, followed by Dareke with her father walking her down the aisle.

Almost as soon as I hit the stage I knew something was wrong. I wasn't nervous anymore and that nervous queasiness had left too. Now, though, I was feeling something else; I was shaking. My first thought was it's just the nervousness in some other form, but as the service really got going I doubted that explanation. Finally it came to me: I hadn't eaten anything since that morning. I have a fairly set schedule for eating during the week, but on the weekends I am normally okay with skipping or delaying mealtimes. Some weekends though, when I try to skip or delay a meal I start getting shaky. That, I assume, is what was happening.

I would try to stand in a relaxed posture with my knees slightly bent and they would begin to shake. I would move my knees back into a locked position and then begin to worry about keeping my knees locked and passing out, the "America's Funniest Home Videos Effect" as I call it. I kept alternating between both of these stances, and I believe it was at this moment that my mother got worried when she saw me begin to sway. A terrible certainty began to creep into my head, I was either going to pass out or collapse on stage if I did not sit down or walk around or do anything other than stand in one spot.

Had I known exactly how much longer I had to stand there, I am sure I could have steeled myself, stayed strong and stayed standing up there. But, as I mentioned in an earlier paragraph, the pastor had summarized much of the service, so I had no idea if there were five minutes or twenty remaining in the service. I turned to the guy next to me and told him that I thought I was gonna hafta walk off the stage. He nodded. I turned back and tried again to steel myself and keep from either sitting down uncontrollably or passing out. Another minute or so passed, and now I started to become aware of my swaying. And so it was that I began to feel as though I had no choice. So, I turned around, dropped my head and walked across the side of the stage to the backstage area, feeling like every eye in the sanctuary was on my slumped, retreating back.

As soon as I got backstage and started pacing around I felt better. But the weight of my embarrassment kept me from feeling too much better. I waited and paced for the remainder of the service, which, to my increased embarrassment, seemed to be over in a few minutes. I debated coming back out so that the bridesmaid I walked in with would not have to walk out alone, but ended up rejecting that idea on the grounds that it would be more distracting for me to walk back out to the stage. I went down the back stairs, dodged the exiting wedding party, and returned to the room that the groomsmen had used as a dressing room. I sat down and waited for the whole thing to be over. There was absolutely no way I could have brought myself down to the reception in the mental state I was in, so I resolved to hang out until everything was over, apologize to Nate and Dareke, and then leave.

One by one the other groomsmen came up to get things or change out of their tuxedos. I gave each of them the same story about how I got really shaky and felt like I was gonna pass out. They were encouraging and told me not to worry about it, that walking off the stage was better than passing out and making a big disturbance, and so on. They made me feel a little better. My mom brought me a cup of water and a cup of shaved ice. As the reception wound down, a few of my friends stopped by to check on me. Jerry actually told me that he had not noticed me leaving and had not realized I was gone for several minutes. I thanked him for saying that. I saw Nathan and told him I was sorry about walking out; he responded that he had not noticed I was gone until he had left the sanctuary. But, in all fairness to my shame, his back was to me, so that is to be expected. I watched as the newlyweds were pelted with seed and watched as they drove off. I changed out of my tux and back into my t-shirt and khakis. I drove home and did something that I, as a headstrong male loner, rarely ever do when I get upset.

I called somebody to talk about it, more specifically I called my little sister.

In a week or two, I will likely regret not finding some way of recording the conversation we had, because once I am past all this, I am pretty sure it might end up being one of the funniest things I have ever heard. When she answered the phone, my sister was sitting in the stands at a Jax State football game, sounding like she was sitting only about two feet from some giant loudspeaker that kept blaring out something which sounded like subway stop information over an old sound system. During the middle of one part of the conversation, as I responded to her attempt at shouted encouragement, the home team scored a touchdown. She said the same consoling things that others had said, told me not to worry about it, told me that if anyone would be likely to not care about something like that it would be them, told me it was better to be remembered as the guy who walked out than the guy who passed out. I said that the thought that was making me the most mental was the thought of, what if I had stayed and nothing had happened to me? That thought was making me crazy. She repeated her encouragements, though a little louder this time to be heard over the announcer.

After that conversation, I spent a few hours destroying all who dared cross my path online. Then, with that done and some frustration expended, I popped "there's something about mary" into my computer to revel for a couple of hours in someone else's embarrassment.

And so now, five days after the wedding, I am just now getting to the point where I can think of it without that twinge. The internal debate between whether I am right to feel ashamed about it and whether I am being egocentric and narcissistic for concentrating on my feelings and shame during the happiest day of two of my friends lives still goes on in my head, but a little quieter than it did earlier in the week. And as I said, in a week or two I will be able to go and look at the pics and vids I took and maybe be able to put them up online.

As it says in one of the random quotes box in the sidebar: "Someday, we'll look back on this, laugh nervously, and change the subject."