A gust of wind had knocked down the bouquet overnight. In the morning, I found the flowers on the floor, white linen ribbon cinching the stems dirty and wet, their shattered mausoleum strewn across the tiles. I had woken up late that day, perhaps my dream had been especially sweet.
Sarah made a beautiful bride and her wedding day had been perfect. I couldn’t stop myself from bawling when she came down the aisle with her old man in-arm. I even momentarily forgot the bitterness of the February wind against my bare, depilated arms, the cold trickling down to my cherry-red painted toenails, scrunched together and numb in satin pumps. The planner reminded us to stand up straight and hold the bouquet at a 45-degree angle, stems parallel to our belly buttons, so that we’d look good in the photos. Sure enough, when the photos came back, I resembled a china doll. My boyfriend told me I looked very beautiful for the first time in a long time, but I didn’t really look like myself. The photos would be printed out and stuck in a binder for the planner to show potential clients.
The pastor recounted how Sarah and Will met as kids: Will, with his shaggy, overgrown boy-mane since reduced to a clean crew cut, and Sarah, an aspiring artist turned corporate Communications Associate; she had even dyed her hair bottle-blonde. Then he started going on about God, how it was God’s Will that the couple had stayed together for this many years and how they would continue to serve Him for the rest of their days, bound by the Holy Sacrament of Marriage. Will’s parents, whose own marriage ended acrimoniously years ago when Will Sr. got caught sleeping with the babysitter, looked on, seated in the first row on opposite ends of the aisle.
While the pastor droned on about God, I thought of little Annmarie, who used to walk to school with me and Sarah. Her house was exactly twelve houses down, a three-minute walk, but only a minute if you measured distance by bike or sprint. Back then our whole world was contained within just a few miles. Not too long ago she jumped off the balcony of her new luxury apartment building and some poor housekeeper going to work the next morning found her splattered in the street. When the news broke, my mom and all the other moms bought huge bouquets of white roses and lilies and left them silently at Annmarie’s mom’s doorstep, in front of a house that was no longer so close to ours. “She was the last person you’d expect this to happen to, such a tragedy.” It was not-so-privately speculated that she did it because her parents split up when she was a kid. I hadn’t spoken to Annmarie in years and tried to look her name up online, but couldn’t find anything except an old Facebook profile and the articles. So whatever it was, now we’d never know. I wondered if she would have otherwise been sitting in the audience today.
The pastor then read a passage from the Bible, something ominous-sounding and boring. I wished they’d at least chose something from Corinthians—Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast, etcetera, etcetera, a verse so ripe for greeting-card filler that it ultimately made it kind of likable. When I told my parents that Sarah was getting married, it naturally prompted an uncomfortable conversation about the trajectory of their own daughter’s life. These should be the best years of your life. Maybe it was just how their life had panned out that everything for me was destined to be downhill from here on out. But if they hadn’t been such strict adherents of tradition, they probably would have gotten divorced a while back and then at least I’d have someone else to blame for my current state of affairs: I had been in an on-and-off relationship for years and had a shitty wage job which berated me for taking time off without pay to attend a close friend’s wedding. I prayed to God, if He did in fact exist, that they were wrong. The happy couple exchanged vows and kissed. I cried once again.
I ended up catching Sarah’s bouquet. I nearly twisted my ankle doing it too, running across the sticky Veuve-covered floor in those heels. I raised it victoriously and everyone cheered and clapped like I was the outfielder who had intercepted a home run. My boyfriend looked at me confused and said, “I thought you never wanted to get married.” I didn’t, but of course I still wanted to catch it. Who knows how much a custom job by the local florist ran them. I’d probably spent over a thousand dollars in my lifetime attempting to brighten whatever dingy apartment that I was living in with those cellophane-wrapped grocery store flowers, which inevitably would wilt by the week’s end. This would be an upgrade, at least for the time being.
Afterwards, they brought out some terrible beige slop for dinner, so instead we drank a lot and danced to Top 40s songs from our youth that normally I’d profess to hate; I was surprised by how easy it was to suspend disbelief amidst such an ultraviolent celebration of life and love. Then at midnight, Sarah was whisked away to begin her new life as a married woman and everybody else went home. She later called to say that Will and her had got into a huge argument on the way to the airport. They sat in silence at the gate waiting to start their two-week lease on paradise, sandwiched between all the other arguing families and newlyweds.
The next morning when I went downstairs, I closed the door and promised to deal with the flowers on the floor and broken glass later. Etcetera: Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.