.: Matt & Melissa: Wedding Contest 2011 Winners

Every year, I have a free wedding photography contest. It is something that I look forward to every year. I do not vote because I don't think it's fair since I will be the one photographing the wedding. This year I had 7 entries. As soon as I read Matt's entry, I knew they were going to win. I just couldn't imagine what it must have been like for them.... I am happy to share with you their story and the photos from their day.

OUR STORY:
Take 1, Scene 1…
It was September 1997 and I was a 22-year-old soldier elated after securing a tour in Germany with the latest reenlistment in my Army career. I had spent a year in Korea followed by two frustrating years here at Ft Bragg and now I would be heading to Europe next spring. Everything was perfect and I was on cruise control, biding my time, minding my p’s and q’s trying to keep anything from interfering with my European vacation.
That is until late one night, my Dream Girl came knocking on my barracks room door and changed everything. She was stunningly beautiful, intelligent, witty, and most amazingly, she seemed as drawn to me as I was to her. She was also my roommate’s sister, which is who she was actually there to see. We talked, flirted and bandied about for a few hours until she needed to get back on the road again and go home…out of my life…maybe forever. Just when the reality of possibly never seeing this amazing girl again hit home, she knocked once more. A fortuitous malfunction with her car had left her stranded for the night so she needed somewhere to stay, and her brother’s place was naturally the best choice! Needless to say I was thrilled to get to spend more time with her. (It wasn’t until much, much later that I discovered she had faked the breakdown to spend more time with me!) The two of us hit it off famously and what transpired next was months of blasting through the workweek to speed off on the three-hour journey to her house every weekend. It was blissful, enjoyably hectic, and we rapidly fell madly in love with each other.
Yet looming ever present was the reality that in the spring I would have to go to Germany. The thought of having to leave her for three years made my heart and soul ache. The month before I had to go, I took leave and stayed at her mom’s house. We spent every moment possible together and talked about the coming years often. I finally asked her to marry me. We both knew that it would be too much of a rush, too soon, but I couldn’t leave her behind. Being the much more practical of the two of us, she turned me down for those very reasons, yet promised to wait for me to return. A dark cloud seemed to come over her, naturally so since the man she loved was leaving, but this seemed to me a darkness much more profound than that. She seemed to withdraw from me and I took it to be the breaking that has happened to soldiers since time immemorial. The reality of a soldier’s life, moving from place to place like a vagrant, rarely visiting the same place twice in his career can crush even the strongest of dreams and murder the strongest loves. This one seemed so different, our love so strong and real! I have ever been the hopeless romantic so perhaps my outlook was a little more rose colored than hers; she was always more of a realist I assumed, perhaps she didn’t believe as strongly in the power of love as I do. With a heavy heart and crushing, constricting bands of grief about my chest, we said our farewells and I went back to Bragg and then on to Germany with her promise to wait for me the only ray of hope in a dark and dismal future.
It seems difficult to fathom these days, but this all transpired around the birth of the Internet. Email accounts were not yet free, chat rooms were the rage, and paper and pen were still the ordinary means of long distance communication. Once I got to Germany I wrote her a letter and poured all I was into it to let her know I was serious about us and that I would return. Weeks passed and there was no return letter so I penned another. This one also went unanswered. My heart torn asunder, I choked down the realization that she did not want anything to do with me anymore. She had cut her losses and moved on. I tried calling but international calls at that point in time were amazingly difficult and I had to use a military line to do so from base. I was afraid to talk to her anyway because if I did and she told me that she didn’t want me anymore than all hope would be lost. Until she said no… well… the answer could still be maybe.
Months later, still no word, still no contact, I finally decided to move on and respect her wishes. I dated. I got married. I was still reeling from losing the true love of my life and tried to fill the aching, gaping hole left in me from it without avail. Every attempt to fill that hole ended in disaster, most ended by their infidelity and I began to wonder if I was permanently broken. Had I lost my One True Love, that Love that only comes once, the one that has inspired epic tales and wrought passion in so many?
Take 2, Scene 2…
It’s February 2010, the Internet age is in full swing and Facebook has become a social media monster. I am no longer a soldier. I got the kids in the divorce, but a single parent stationed in Germany and deployed to Iraq without viable childcare is not something the Army allows, even if I had already served 16 years. One day while checking Facebook I see a friend request from a Scott I was roommates with back at Bragg. We link-up and he has set up a group of lots of the folks we were stationed with together. Many of which had been searching for me for quite some time. Apparently Matthew Smith is a fairly common name but they persevered and finally found me. While writing on Scott’s wall one day, one of his friends catches my eye and my stomach drops to the floor. It was Melissa. Her last name was still the same she still looked the same. Hope, dangerous, insidious hope sprung forth and my hands began to tremble…after all these years did I dare to hope? I clicked on her picture and my heart butterflied, there were two kids on her lap, but so what…I had two kids. With sweaty palms I typed and retyped and retyped and retyped a message in a friend request. My heart was racing like I had run a marathon…what does one say after 13 years?! I have no idea what I actually wrote, couldn’t tell you if my life depended on it, but the important thing is that I wrote something and clicked send. It was on her again…what if she didn’t write back? What if she hated me? What if she was married? What if’s can be so terribly treacherous…
The next morning I checked my Facebook again eager to see if she had responded. She had and my heart soared… and then plummeted again. What if…? I clicked the message open before I could doubt any further. She had accepted my friend request! We chatted back and forth on Facebook for a little while and then exchanged phone numbers and have spoken to each other every day since. In no less than a week I had bought a plane ticket to go out to North Carolina a few months later to see her again.
Our first meeting in the airport that day was not as uncomfortable as many would assume. Our daily conversations had cleared up a good many of each other’s questions before this day and we comfortably (albeit a bit like a sweaty palmed pair of teenagers) wrapped our arms around each other and kissed the first kiss after 13 long, long years. She was soooo so beautiful… We spent the long trip back to her place and the rest of the evening talking and filling in each other’s back-story even more. It turned out that she had received The Letter so many years ago but the front of the envelope was so badly smeared that she could not read the return address. She waited for another but it never came, so she just kept waiting. From time to time she searched for me, through some military search sites, some civilian search sites, but as I said before, Matthew Smith is a fairly common name. She had dated as well, but just like my experiences, there was always something missing, something not quite right.
Slowly the realization sank in that this amazing woman had kept her hope alive and stayed true to her promise 13 years earlier…she had waited.
During the next two weeks we traveled a bit, I met some of her friends, had dinner at her brother’s place and reacquainted with him, the rest of their family and with Scott who helped make this all possible. But it wasn’t until we traveled into the Blue Ridge Mountains one fateful, overcast day, when I came across my truest realization. We had spent the better part of the morning looking around Blowing Rock and the surrounding area and were driving the Blue Ridge Parkway when we came to the end of the road. There was a trail so we climbed it. The trail led us to the top of a hill that was dominated by a vast curving dome of granite that afforded us a clear, breathtaking view of the rolling expanse of mountains. We sat down and tried to take it all in for a while and then proceeded to explore the rest of the hilltop. I hopped atop this one particular rock outcropping and she walked up beside it. I looked down at her and when she gazed up at me all thirteen years came rushing up and sucker-punched me in the heart…hard.
I Love her and I am going to marry her.
This amazingly wonderful woman, this beautiful, smart, sexy, patient woman would be my Princess Bride, and I her husband. A deep sense of rightness washed over me and despite the rain a warmth coursed through me, a warmth that I could see reflected in her gaze. In that moment we both knew that we would marry and spend the rest of our lives together.
Since that day we have flown back and forth between North Carolina and Oregon a few times. She was a raging hit with my kids and they with her. We set a date for our wedding and have made plans for me to move my family out to her this summer.