Latest / Just Julia / I Would Wait Again

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I Would Wait Again · Just Julia

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: I would wait again.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes we understand a chapter only after we've lived the ones that came after it.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: Four years ago today, on September 17th, 2022, Alessandro and I got married on Lake Como.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: And a few days ago, someone said something about our wedding that stopped me.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sorry, so many things went wrong that day, he said.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: I remember looking at Alessandro.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: What went wrong?
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: We genuinely didn't know what he meant.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: When I think about that day, I remember one of the most beautiful days of my life.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: I remember walking into the church and finally seeing Alessandro waiting for me,
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: after almost three years of waiting for that moment.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember what was playing.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: Hans Zimmer's 503.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: It probably makes absolutely no sense as music for a bride walking into a church,
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: but it made perfect sense to us.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: Alessandra and I had listened to Hans Zimmer endlessly in the car.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: During those years when we didn't know when our wedding would actually happen,
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: I had closed my eyes and imagined that entrance to that exact piece.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: The church, the doors, him waiting.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: For a long time, the music gave a soundtrack to a moment that didn't exist yet.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: And then, suddenly, it did.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: I remember my parents sitting inside that church.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: Relatives who had traveled all the way from Brazil,
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: some of whom I wasn't even sure would make it.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: Friends crying during speeches.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: I remember the perfect temperature and the little wind that kept everyone cool.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember the music continuing to follow us through the day.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: Maestro, another Hans Zimmer piece I love, as we entered the aperitivo.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: Max Richter's spring, filling the dining room before dinner with this almost fairytale feeling.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: And then,
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: Alessandro and I entered dinner to Mr.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: Brightside by the Killers,
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: because apparently,
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: after almost three years of waiting, subtlety was no longer required.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: It was loud and unexpected and ridiculously fun.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: We danced to a thousand years.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: I danced with my father to Jimmy Fontana's Il Mondo.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: There was Barry White and toward the end of dinner Volare came on and suddenly
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: the room was full of people waving white napkins in the air.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: None of it belonged together on paper.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: Somehow it all belonged together for us.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: I remember thinking that after everything we had made it.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember Romeo.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: Of course I remember Romeo.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: Apparently, there were things that didn't go perfectly that day.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: There was traffic.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: Some people were nervous about being late.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: There was wind.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe there were other little things.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: I honestly don't remember them.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: And that struck me.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: For almost four years, I had carried one version of that day with me.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: It was just perfect.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: Not perfect as in every minute was flawless.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: Perfect because it was hours.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: We talk a lot about memory when it comes to pain.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: Someone says something cruel to us when we are young
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: and decades later we can still hear the sentence.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: Someone doesn't choose us.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: Someone makes us feel rejected, unseen, not good enough.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: Something doesn't happen the way we thought it would and we decide we failed.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: We carry these things because somewhere along the way, consciously or not, we gave them meaning.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: I know I have done that.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: I have allowed words,
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: moments,
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: and other people's perceptions of me to become part of my own way of seeing myself,
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: sometimes for years.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: But I had never really thought about the opposite.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: If we can give so much power to the painful things,
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: why can't we also choose what stays from the beautiful ones?
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: Why can't I decide the wind was perfect?
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: Why can't the traffic be irrelevant?
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: Why can't my parents sitting inside that church outweigh
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: a hundred tiny imperfections that no one really remembers?
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe happiness deserves that kind of loyalty too.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: Because if there was ever a wedding that didn't go according to plan, it was ours.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: We got engaged on Christmas Day 2019.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: We were supposed to get married in 2021.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: And then the world changed.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: COVID arrived.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: Borders closed.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: Brazil and Italy felt impossibly far apart.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: So we postponed.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: And postponed.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: And postponed again.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: Meanwhile, we watched friends who had become engaged after us get married before us.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: We attended their weddings while still not knowing when ours would be.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: That was hard.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: There was another pressure, too.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: I was getting older, and people reminded me of that.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you should have a baby first, they said.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you shouldn't wait for the wedding.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: But I had such a clear picture in my head of how I wanted to live those moments.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted my bachelorette party.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted to celebrate with my friends.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted to put on my wedding dress and dance and have our honeymoon.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: And then I wanted to think about becoming a mother.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps life didn't care very much about my timeline, but I cared.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: So we waited.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: And through all that waiting, we kept listening to the music.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: Even on the days when the wedding felt impossibly far away, those songs were still there.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes we would listen in the car and imagine the moments we had planned.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: Walking into the church, arriving at the reception, finally celebrating with everyone we loved.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: In a strange way, the music let us visit a day that hadn't happened yet.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: We didn't know when we would get there.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: We just kept believing that eventually we would.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: On September 25th, 2021,
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: one of the dates when we should have been getting married,
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: we did something else entirely.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: We got a dog.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: Romeo came home.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: It didn't feel profound at the time.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: We were still disappointed.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: Alessandro was working remotely,
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: we weren't getting married, we weren't starting our family the way we had imagined.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: We just asked ourselves a small question.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: What can we do now?
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: We had met this impossibly small Pomeranian a few weeks earlier and fallen completely in love.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: Without realizing it,
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: while we were waiting to become a family in the way we had imagined,
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: we had already started becoming one.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: Had everything gone according to plan, Romeo might not be in our lives.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: He wasn't a consolation for us.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: He was family.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: A few days after that recent conversation, I found something I had completely forgotten.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: A speech.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: I had written it for Alessandro a few weeks before the wedding.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: I never read it.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: There were already so many speeches that day, and mine stayed tucked away.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think Alessandro has ever heard everything I wanted to tell him.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: Until now.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: In that speech,
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: I had written about how,
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: before him,
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: I never really planned long term,
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: and how he taught me to imagine the future I wanted.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: How, little by little, I started to see some of those dreams becoming real.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: There was a list of things we wanted for our future.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: Getting married,
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: having a dog,
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: and then I found a line I had written before I had even lived
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: the wedding I'm writing about today.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: After a while, you understand why sometimes things don't go according to plan.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: I was writing about Romeo.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: Before the wedding had even happened, I already knew.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: Something I had cried over,
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: resisted,
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: and wished had been different had also made room
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: for something I would never give back.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: A year after we finally married, Edo was born.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: And the years that once felt like standing still began to look different from the other side.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: First Romeo, Then that church.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: Then Edo.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: Our family didn't arrive according to my original timeline.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: It arrived according to its own.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: And perhaps that's why this story has found me again now.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: Because once again,
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: Alessandro and I find ourselves looking at plans we had made and realizing that some
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: of them will have to wait.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: Life changed.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: The timing changed.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: And once again, there are things we thought would be happening now that aren't.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: And it's hard.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: There are days when I struggle with where I am,
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: days when I want to know what comes next,
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: when this particular pause will end,
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: when life will start moving in the direction I imagined again.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: But I keep thinking about the woman who wrote that speech in August 2022.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: She didn't know either.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: When our first wedding plans fell apart I couldn't see what was coming.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: I couldn't see Romeo yet.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: I couldn't see myself walking down that aisle with Hans Zimmer playing
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: and finding Alessandro at the other end.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: I couldn't see my parents sitting there.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: I couldn't see Edo.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: I could only see the door that had closed.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: And today, once again, I can only see as far as today.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe that's what I want to remember.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: Not that everything happens for a reason.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if life works that neatly.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: And not that every disappointment eventually turns itself into a gift.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes things just hurt.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: But I have lived long enough to know
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: that there are moments we cannot fully understand while we're inside them.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: Alessandro and I might look back at this period years from now and understand it differently.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: Or maybe not.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: And that is the point.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: Someone can look at the most beautiful day of my life and remember the things that went wrong.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: I can look at the same day and remember everything that went right.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: The waiting.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: My parents in that church.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: Our families finally together.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: Our friends crying.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: The music.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: The wind.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: Alessandro waiting for me.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: Romeo.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: If I could go back, knowing everything I know now, I would wait again.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: I would postpone again.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: I would choose Romeo again.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: I would walk into that same church.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: I would marry the same man.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: I would choose that day exactly as it was.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: Things didn't go according to plan, and somehow nothing went wrong.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: Amore mio, buon anniversario, quattro anni, ti risposerei altre mille volte.