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I'm waiting for her to show up, having sweated my share of nerves and tears. She's always late, and I'm not sure I'll ever get used to it; I think she sometimes does it just to prove she's still her own woman, one who doesn't need a man at all. That's fine with me, for the most part, I just need her to be here when it's time to say the words, the chant, if you will, that will bind us together whether or not we actually have the right to belong to each other. Here she comes, down the aisle on the arms of a father I'll learn later is still in competition with me for the heart of his daughter; with whom I will later compete for the love of my leather recliner, remote control, absence of piss stains on my toilets, and right to be the man of the house. That's fine with me, though, because for the most part I'm a fairly adaptable man; if it means peace in my house, I'm always in favor of letting the little ones slide and saving the really important victories for later. But look at her in her off-white, her smile as wide as my grasp, her skin begging me to kiss it safe, her well-apportioned figure waiting for me to run my hands up and down and make her feel protected. Ironic that as I write this, I remember that very moment where I waited to seal the deal on being her MAN, yet the many years later throughout which she could never bring herself to trust me. I look back on that moment, and wish I could remember exactly where her eyes wandered when they weren't lookng at me - was it Daddy who captured her gaze, offering her the refuge she would never believe me capable of offering? Was it to her girlfriends, with a slight and unnoticeable nod of agreement that this relationship of hers would fail like all the others? Was it to her mother, a silently-and-secretly strong woman who knew what it meant to hold a man together? Or maybe it was a ghost she was seeking, a man from her past who had taught her to be less selfish by taking everything and giving nothing; who had treated her the same way the storybook bad boys treat the girls who favor them over the 'nice guys' waiting patiently in the wings; who had owned her body and her mind and her soul...and as it would turn out later, her heart. But I didn't know all of this back then, all I could see was the woman I loved, the loving warmth I wanted all to myself, the mother of my future children, and the best friend with whom i would enjoy a lifetime of sleepovers. I was a man deceived, but even now I admit I never saw any deception, I believed with the truest of hearts that this was my life, my future, the best thing that had ever happened to me and ever would. So now, so many years later, I have to ask myself as I look backwards at her coming up the aisle...does she know that what I have now is what I always wanted with her? Does she believe in me as she's walking toward me, does she feel it all the way down the way I do? Hell I didn't even know it at that very moment, but I'm looking back right now and I see it as if I'm some kind of angel or fly on the wall. How can I explain it, all those time since that...angelic, goddamit!...day when we pledged our vow to be defeated someday, all that time walking on the rocks, all those moments we hated the world together, every time we told ourselves that none of it mattered because we...WE were inside and it was everybody else standing around looking for a place to sink their claws? How can I explain to her that I actually believed the bullshit I was spouting..."Do you take this woman to be your lawful, wedded wife, to have and to hold, in sickness and in health, until death do you part?" Goddamn did I ever...I look back on that moment and my heart fills with curses, damn her to hell for never believing in me, damn me to hell for fuck's sake lacking whatever it took to make her become mine once and for all, and damn the whole world for throwing her all sorts of reasons, all manner of excuses for always finding some reason I just wasn't what she was looking for...goddamn all of you who don't believe in true love the way I do and just throw it down the shitter like another night after a tequila crawl. It hurts even now, goddamn it still hurts, I still try to drink my way around it...even now so many years later, even now after I've lived an entirely separate and double life since her, even now that I've created the very things I always thought would belong to her and to me, the two things that would bind us...but what I was too late in finding out scared her the very most. |