Word Count: 302
The day flew by so quickly I don’t think I even enjoyed it. I’d waited so long, built such enthusiasm, made such plans, then it was suddenly here and just as suddenly gone. All that excitement and flurry of a storybook wedding is long past, the last notes of the band music faded past the strain of an ear, and all that’s left is a white gown crumpled and stained at the hem, and a man who’s been pronounced as my husband.
The day has become just a series of photos spaced in a narrative form in an album. A one and a half hour video that captures the dressing up of a young woman into a bride and walking her down to the sacrificial altar. The ritual meal and the celebration of the natives in drunken dancing and wild innuendos and jokes that are so out of place at a wedding these days because that “first night” was, come on, not the first time at all.
It was all about the happiest day of my life. I replay it again and again, on the videos, flipping through the album pages like a cartoon movie. It really was the happiest day of my life but I’ve had to relive it through recall. Life following that day went decidedly downward and the whole reason for the event is what I do wish would somehow just go away.
But he won’t.
I’ve since shredded the gown but the man, the groom, the one purpose to the whole thing remains. Much fatter, much lazier, much balder and much more real than I ever had dreamed it would be.
So I spend my days getting through the days and my nights dreaming of weddings, the way weddings and happy-ever-afters I’d been told would be.
