That summer my Mom looked at me in the middle of the day and said, “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. I just couldn’t go back to things the way they were. I wish I could.”
The sadness in her was incredible. I knew it had been hard for her, that leaving my father took a giant amount of strength, but she’s done a lot and a lot that’s difficult. I should have realized this was the hardest, the worst of all. But I hadn’t.
Later that week, my father and I were sitting on the porch talking. He wanted to throw me a party to celebrate my wedding and give me a grand to put towards it.
“No, Dad, you don’t need to do that. I think Glenn and I will maybe, one day have a real wedding. I mean, I never saw myself getting married without my family there.”
“Yeah, neither did we,” he said.
I stayed quiet. I guess I had pictured my wedding, I just hadn’t realized until then.
“You were always so romantic,” he said. “I sang you a song about Hank Williams who had to leave an Indian woman, and you cried until I made up a new ending and told you he came back to get her. You would watch those Disney movies over and over again and you always cried when they married Prince Charming.”
I hadn’t remembered. Thinking about the little me, her romantic hopes, made me realize that I did believe in fairytales once. Sure, the marriage ceremony itself didn’t matter, maybe not even then, but I did believe, with some child-part of me, in love eternal. My Dad had always remembered. The way he dealt with it was wrong, but now it seemed he was only trying to do the right thing, trying to force me to live up to what he thought I wanted, thought I deserved.
My mom was only trying to do the same.
Once, they had loved each other, and they both had wanted so desperately for it to be eternal. Things just didn’t turn out that way. They, like everyone else, had spent their decades together trying to do the right thing. They tried to be good, they tried to be right, they tried, as best they knew how, to make it work. They tried.
And that’s the saddest thing of all.
I tell people that they’re happier now. But they’re not. This is just where the chips fell. Looking back and looking forward, there were one million reasons this all happened but one feels truest; these things just do.
That sort of sums up my feelings about life. Things, good and bad, happen randomly, for no real reason other than that they just do. And so things change. People get married and marriages break up because that’s the course your life feels like taking.
The room felt warm that Glenn and I were married in. My face hurt from smiling. My eyes were starry because Gina’s camera kept flashing. When he was saying his vows I thought of my parents. I wondered if they were spending this moment separated, but together, with thoughts of me, thoughts of them, thoughts of forever. If they’d spend the rest of their lives separated but together, if every moment would be split in two, coloured with remorse for what could have been, for what eventually was.
Then that feeling and the heaviness floats away. As I move towards the sweet, redeeming light, I think, I love him.
I love him.
Months later, when I go to visit him in Belfast, I forget my wedding rings.
No comments:
Post a Comment