Saturday Plans

When I don’t have to go to pink collar wage slave job #2, my Saturdays generally consist of sleeping in, followed by perhaps brunch with the boy and some sort of effort to extricate my house from borderline chaos and filth with which I seem destined to surround myself. The evenings often involve friends and dinners or bars, again assuming that I am not working.

This Saturday, though, an old friend of the family is getting married. Our parents have been friends since they were in high school, and our mothers were pregnant with us at the same time. Our families have shared countless barbecues and midwinter parties, and some of my fondest memories of early childhood involve playing with Paul.

Perhaps, if she seems a laughing sort, I will tell his bride how Paulie and I used to play Star Wars in a blue plastic pool in his backyard, or how every summer he seemed to have a ready supply of box turtles. If I get really drunk, I might be prevailed upon to relate my earliest memory of the dashing groom, that is, him pitching a howling fit because the cold butter had torn a hole in his bread at the local pizza place. Although that last might be a story I just save for the other people who went to high school with us.

As Paul and I grew up, we found that we had fewer and fewer interests in common. When we went to high school together we were certainly friendly, but in the distant, nod to one another in the hallway kind of way. Now as adults, we see one another for major events but not much else. Still though, I am very happy for him and his family, and I’m looking forward to meeting his new wife and to hearing about their excitement about their new life.

I like weddings as a general rule, as long as the other guests don’t devote overmuch time to conversing with my cleavage. There is something life-affirming about the human willingness to fly in the face of evident futility and accumulated knowledge and promise lifelong devotion to another. It warms my chill little heart to see people behave with so much hope and so little reason.

That said, though, today a quick little wave of dread washed over me as it occurred to me that this wedding will be widely attended by people who attended my embarkation of my matrimonial Titanic’s maiden voyage just over six years ago. I have seen all these people since I’ve been divorced; it’s not like it will be news to anyone. Hell, most of these people have known me my whole life and probably weren’t surprised that another human being was unable to tolerate my constant companionship.

I feel kind of like a tart who spent a bunch of money to stand in front of a bunch of people with a fistful of flowers and a mouth full of lies. Even though I know that no one but me gives a fleeting fuck about any of this, the fact remains that I do. I sort of feel like I should wear an inappropriate evening gown and my whore-red lipstick to this shindig.

You know what though? I sort of think I should feel this way. Not in some sort of self-loathing-I-deserve-to-be-punished-and-suffer-way, but more that I think it’s important to have learned from that mistake. If it didn’t hurt a little, then wouldn’t that mean that I didn’t, at the very least, mean the words I said at the time that I said them? Even though that marriage was a mistake, and I suspected so at the time, I can at least say that I leaned into the traces and tried to haul that miserable fucker out of the sucking mud of failure.

It should hurt when you break promises, even if they were the wrong promises to make.

This little pang will pass. Tomorrow will be lovely, I’m certain. Perhaps if I’m lucky there will be good music and The Boy will honor me with a dance. That would be a good thing.