12 Days

12 days.

We've almost paid everyone we need to pay.  People are still secondhandedly announcing their possible intentions to come when the RSVP deadline was April 15.  We got galvanized buckets on sale for 50% off at Hobby Lobby to line the aisles with baby's breath and/or sunflowers.  I never imagined that buying buckets on sale would ever be even marginally tied to any sense of personal satisfaction.

We're writing our own vows.  I haven't even gotten started on mine yet.  Of course my guy is well on his way to finishing his, despite the many other papers and projects he's working on now.  He's such a poetic, creative soul.  I love that about him.  It's overwhelmingly endearing and super sexy at the same time.  I mean, I was proposed to with an original song and poem.  I'm sorry, but nothing can top that.  I am completely convinced that I have the best proposal story ever.  I have a creative side, too, but I'm just so...sort of floating around in the ether right now. I need to find the presence of mind to do it.  Soon.

I don't know why, but we're this close to The Big Day, and I still can't picture it.  Like, I still can't wrap my mind around wearing a wedding dress and walking down a grassy aisle on my father's arm.  I can't picture standing below a sunflower-entwined dark wooden arch with a lily pad pond in the background while we say our vows.  I can't imagine riding away in a horse-drawn carriage with my new husband.  All of these things are going to happen.  But it still doesn't seem like it is going to happen.  For some reason, in a way, I know they're going to happen, but it feels like they're going to happen to someone else.

I'm trying to enjoy this time and not let my temporary dissertation-writing hiatus get to me, but I can't help it.  I am a non-productive helium balloon while my fiancé is a well-oiled, paper-typing, project-finishing machine.  I've spent the past few days eating apple cinnamon instant oatmeal and watching BuzzFeed videos while he's been running statistical analysis of his "tokens" on R.  I know that once the wedding is over and we get back from our honeymoon, I will have to kick it into gear.  I'll be teaching an online class, writing an additional chapter and editing a manuscript for a professor.  I'm just in this cloudy otherworld right now and I just have to accept the fact that I'm in it and will continue to exist in it for a little while longer.

While there's a part of me that feels this nebulous almost detachment, there's another part of me that is experiencing this heady, adrenaline-laced sense of expectation.  Every time I look at him, I have this impulse to examine him to the point of abstraction.  How his freckles sprinkle over his upper cheeks.  A couple of eyebrow hairs that are lighter than the rest.  Long, dark lashes blinking slowly.  That scar on his right elbow.  His dimple on the right cheek.  His fingers are more than twice the size of mine.  I wear a ring size 4.  He wears a size 11.  He has this way of biting the corner of his bottom lip.  Somehow, each of these mundane details are like tiny miracles.