It all started when I woke up on the wrong side of the bed.
As soon as I opened my eyes, I felt a grey, grouchy aura envelop me, as though an uninvited visitor had just stayed longer than 12 minutes.
I made my way to the kitchen for breakfast. I had forgotten to turn on the dishwasher, so I had to eat out of a dirty cereal bowl. It felt like a bad omen on my wedding day.
My groomsmen showed up at 10 and we left to play a couple of rounds of golf.
I lost my lucky ball in the trees next to the 5th fairway, then I shot a 12 on a par 3, which pissed me off so much that I broke a 9-iron over my knee. I swore I heard one of my buddies mutter, “Did Clark wake up on the wrong side of the bed?”, but when I whipped my head around they were all silently cleaning their balls.
We left the course and headed to the hotel to get ready. I tried to muster up some anticipation about seeing my bride, Samantha, in a couple of hours. We had been dating for 8 years and engaged for 7 and we hadn’t even slept together yet. So there was that to look forward to.
But then I chewed out the room service guy for forgetting ketchup on my pre-marital onion rings and my best man, Jeremy, said “Boy, looks like someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed!”. Luckily he’s way stronger than me, because I grabbed his twin stripe silk cravat and tried to choke him.
The wedding was in the same hotel so we headed downstairs and made our way to the front of the Balmoral Room. As I waited for Sam to walk down the aisle, I noticed everyone smiling at me. Pretending to be excited when they really just wanted to take advantage of the free bar.
The wedding went off without a hitch, but Sam looked a little upset when, instead of saying “I do”, I mumbled “whatever”. The officiant just smiled, and said “It seems our groom here woke up on the wrong side of the bed”. That got a chuckle from the guests while I contemplated shoving his folio up his ass.
The reception lasted 17 hours.
The chicken was dry and Sam kept wanting to hand-feed me her asparagus. She looked at me in horror when I slapped her fork away. “Babe, is it true that you woke up on the wrong side of the bed?”, she whispered.
I turned away and chugged my tenth beer from the free bar, already forgetting that I was the one paying for it.
Before long it was time for my speech. I had prepared what I wanted to say but left my notes at home. So I had to wing it, which I’ve been terrified to do ever since my eighth grade valedictorian speech when I accidently called our principal “Mr. Dickhead”.
But I remembered some old advice to keep it honest, and since all I could think of was how much I wanted this day to end, I simply said, “Thanks for coming, but the sooner you leave, the sooner I can go home.”
I sensed an eruption among the guests and heard a few mumbles of “It’s ok, it’s ok, rumour has it that he just woke up on the wrong side of the bed”.
Then the DJ started up and Sam dragged me to the floor for our carefully choreographed first dance to Crazy Little Thing Called Love. But my feet felt like they were stuck in the silt of a fly-fishing river, so I simply clutched her and we swayed to the slow sorrowful beat in my head.
Sam quickly beckoned others to the dance floor, but the grey grouchy aura had turned a cool black.
I got into a fist fight with my brother Brandon, and it only ended when I dumped a punch bowl over his head. As he lay there, drenched and sticky, he looked up at me with his one unswollen eye and yelled “what the hell is wrong with you, why would you wake up on the wrong side of the bed, today of all days!”
He was right. I was dragging the whole night down. I disappeared when it was time to cut the cake because I didn’t trust myself with a pointed server engraved with Sweet Beginnings.
Sam found me later, lying on a couch in the hallway outside the Princess Room wedding of Dr. Caroline Graham and Ron Watters. She held my hand in hers, and pledged that, for better or for worse, from that night forward, she would let me choose which half of our mattress I wanted to sleep on.
That way I would always wake up on the right side of the bed.