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Juliet Anonymous

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - THE WEDDING

The true mourning begins…

“So, this is the property declaration. I just need you to sign—“

“I signed this already.” Paris said, annoyed.


It was the early afternoon. The kids were in school, and I asked Paris to stop by to sign the second set of forms I had to file to keep the divorce in motion. Last time I had him sign something, he was irritated that I tried to shoot the shit with him before diving in. As if I was being too blasé about the whole thing. I was just trying to fulfill our promise of friendship to one another, but Paris was never very good with promises. Or vows for that matter. So, this time, I got right to it. Shocker, it didn’t make a bit of difference.


“I know, but I need you to sign it again.” I said, trying to sound as patient as possible.

“Why?”

Jesus, fuck, man!

“I don’t know, okay? I’m just following the directions, and these are the forms it says they need next.” I said, holding up the pamphlet I had been given at the family law office. It was a choose-your-own-adventure style guide book to divorce, complete with arrows, instructions, and cute little bubbles with details like, Don’t worry! If your spouse does not respond to the summons, you can still get divorced! It felt like the directions for some fucked up, family board game.


“Fine. Whatever.” he replied.


I was relieved, but as he signed the eighth and final form, my heart involuntarily sank.

“What is it?” He said, hand on the knob to leave.


“Nothing. I’m fine.” I said, but my eyes were welling with tears. I couldn’t help it. I wanted this marriage to be over. I want this marriage to be over. But here it was, really ending. After all those youthful hopes. The promises we made. Promises I never intended to break.


“I just…” I started, knowing I probably shouldn’t. “I watched the wedding video.”


“Oh…” Paris softened, his hand slipping from the door. “How was it?”


A few months before our ten-year anniversary, I had paid a friend of ours five-hundred dollars to edit our wedding footage. Why had it taken ten years, you ask? Well, for starters, the term ‘wedding footage’ only barely applies. Paris and I didn’t have any money when we got married, both only 28 years old. We had purchased our rings for three-hundred bucks each from the wholesale jewelry district in Downtown L.A.. I’m pretty sure we only had about eight grand total for the wedding, most of which we spent on the food. Food we never even got to eat, we were so busy talking and dancing. But everyone who was at the wedding remembers it. That was some good fucking food.


So, needless to say, there wasn’t any cash left over for a wedding photographer, much less a videographer. I did, however, still have my HD video camera from my then defunct production company. One of the teenagers at the wedding took it upon herself to pick it up and record the entire evening. As grateful as I was to her, the camera wasn’t great in low light, and she was far from a pro. What footage we did have to remember the day by looked more like The Blair Witch Project than a celebration of love. I always told myself I’d cut it together some day anyway, but just never found the time.

I never did find the time. But finally, coming up on ten years of marriage, I felt safely liquid enough to pay someone else to do it for me.

The plan had been to watch the video together, for the first time, on our ten-year anniversary, but we all know how that turned out. I tried to wait, dear Nurse. It sounds stupid, but that's how nuts I was by the end of my marriage. I thought, let me just get past our anniversary so we can watch the video, and then I’ll leave him. I don’t know what makes me more of a tool, the fact that I was going to wait to dissolve my marriage for the sake of a five hundred dollar video, or the fact that I simply could not wait four more days. I was so fucking unhappy, and the words just tumbled out.

The friend who edited the video had worked hard on it, and I felt terrible for him. I tried to watch it a few days after the split, but I just couldn’t. I was too raw, and in the midst of combating Paris’s pleading, crying, and gut-wrenching acceptance of the end.


But this morning, I was going through some e-mails, and there it was. The delivery of the video from our mutual friend, just days before the would-be anniversary.

I got the girls out the door, dropped Big off at elementary school, and then, while sitting outside Little’s preschool for a half an hour, waiting for it to open, I finally decided to watch the video.


The days leading up to our August 6th wedding had been hectic. At the time, I had a regular summer job directing teen theater in upstate New York. Paris is exceptionally good with kids, and so, for the second year in a row, he had come along to assist me in the production. We bickered then, but it was still magic. We directed some brilliant fucking shows together, we really did.

The final performance had been the week before, leaving us with strike and the general reorganization of the community center space that hosted the theater program. Additionally, I had produced a documentary about the program itself, which I decided to organize a screening of three days before the wedding. But managing all this in the days leading up to my nuptials was only a small part of the chaos. Spinning plates is my thing, and I’m good at it. No, the biggest issue in the final days of my bachelorette-hood was the fact that 48 hours before the wedding, I discovered I didn’t have a dress.


The Catskill Mountain community where the summer productions were held is one I’ve been a part of since I was a child. My godmother is a part of it, so is my father, and so is his girlfriend of nearly twenty years. I spent all my summers there growing up, and so I always try to give back when I can. In such an effort, I had contacted a local seamstress I knew six months beforehand. We agreed on a price for the dress, which I paid in advance, and shipped her the materials from Los Angeles, ahead of my New York arrival.


I had gone for a fitting weeks before, upstairs in the run-down house she was renting with her two daughters. She draped on me what few pieces she had put together. Part of a bodice and the beginnings of a skirt. I know nothing about making clothes, so I didn’t think much about where she was in the process. I was actually too busy trying not to be the basic bitch who passed out during her dress fitting. I only narrowly escaped that fate.


But a few days before the wedding, when I contacted the woman to see when I could pick up my finished dress, she flatly apologized and said she couldn’t do it.


“What?” I blinked, holding the phone, but no longer feeling it in my hand.


“I’m sorry. It’s not done, and there’s no way I can finish it in time.”


My world spun, landing on a hard, right tilt, my feet sliding on the uneven ground beneath me. But, Dearest Nurse, this is one of the proudest moments of my life. I knew given the circumstances, I could have bridezilla’d the fuck out, and not a soul on this planet would have held it against me. This was beyond shitty. But I also knew that if I played it cool and just focused on a quick and easy resolution, I could come out of this the coolest bride-to-be in the whole wide world.

I turned to my mother, who had just arrived from China, where she was living at the time.


“Can I borrow five hundred bucks?” I didn’t have a dime left, and I knew I wasn’t going to get shit back from the woman who had decided to go ahead and not make my wedding dress.

“Of course.” She said. Have I mentioned I fucking love my mom?

We got in my summer rental car and b-lined it to town. I screeched to a halt in front of the restaurant where Paris was having lunch with his mother and her sisters.


“There’s no dress.” I said.

“What?”


“No time to explain. I have to get another one, now.”


There were four bridal shops in town. I hit two of them first, and had Paris go to the other two ahead of me to pick out whatever he thought might work. To hell with not seeing the dress before the day. This was a fucking emergency that punched tradition right in its stupid face.

Because of the sheer amount of stress and activities in the week leading up to the wedding, I hadn’t eaten a whole lot, and was pretty much running on caffeine. This ended up being incredibly fortuitous. I was a sample size that day, and easily found not one, but two cheap, nice looking, polyester dresses. One for the ceremony and one for the reception, and my mom even threw in a pair of white, satin shoes. As long as there weren’t any open flames come wedding day, I was golden.


We were supposed to exchange vows outdoors, in a beautiful little nook in the back of my godmother’s garden under the trees, and then retreat to the tent for the reception. As fate would have it, the rain started at 3, and was predicted to continue for the rest of the night. It was another moment I could have lost it, but I didn’t care. All I cared about was that I was finally going to get to marry Paris. A man I knew I would exchange those famous "I do"s with the first moment I met him. Nothing else mattered. We could have gotten hitched in a parking lot by a dumpster, officiated by Oscar the fucking Grouch and I would have been happy. I would have. Nothing could touch me that day, and nothing did.

When I heard Hey, Soul Sister, the Train song that began our wedding procession, I paused the video and took a breath.


“You okay, baby?” I asked, turning to the back seat where Little was watching Monsters Inc. on an iPad strapped to the back of my seat.


“I okay, mama.”


Damn. She was fine. I had no excuse not to watch this video. I sighed and pressed play.


And there he came. 28-year-old Paris, skipping down the stairs of my godmother’s farm house and into the wedding tent. He looked adorable and nervous in the perfectly fitted Zara suit we had found for him. Seeing him like that again, happy, excited, and completely rooted in the moment, yanked at my tired heart.

I laughed out loud watching our wedding party enter the tent. We had paired our friends up so randomly. None of them had ever met before, and then we made them fucking dance all the way down the steps and into the tent. But by god, they must have loved us, because they all did it. It was so cute.


And then, there I was. Confident and graceful in my cheap, flammable, size-four wedding dress, dancing in with my dad. He almost slipped on the wet steps. Something I hadn’t noticed then. But he recovered with only a small gasp from the attendees, and kept right on dancing. No one bothered to turn off the song after we entered, so he and I just kept right on dancing until the end like no one was watching. My father and I have had our ups and downs, but I felt so much love for him this morning, watching him dance like that. For me. For my wedding. A wedding to a man he adored, still adores, and who will no longer be his son in law.


I’ve spent a lot of time focusing on the negative in my marriage, and there’s good reason for that. I dealt with a lot of bullshit. Even Paris admits to that. (More than admits, actually. He owns it.) But by living that reality for the past five years or so, that became the prevailing belief - that my marriage was a troubled one, start to finish. That the red flags were there from day one. The anger problems. It was never meant to last, and I just ignored the signs… but watching Paris and I say our vows to one another. The softness of our faces, the tears in our eyes, and the complete and total openness of our hearts - Oh, Nurse, I’m tearing up writing this… And shit, now I’m crying. Because all I could feel in that moment, sitting in my car, a newly single mother with Little in the back, who has spent the past month reveling in the fact that I’m finally free - what I suddenly knew with one hundred percent certainty, was that I did not marry the wrong person.

“It’s… It’s really nice.” I said to Paris as he stood by the door, letting the tears fall.


“Maybe I’ll watch it sometime.” He said, his eyes welling too. And then he nodded. “I will. I don’t know when, but I will.”


I expected when I watched the video to see all the things that, after the wedding was long over, bugged me about that day. That I had made a point to memorize my vows and he hadn’t, stumbling over the words and having to be prompted repeatedly by his cousin who officiated our wedding. That I would watch our first dance together and remember how much of a pain in the ass he was every time we rehearsed it. Getting into a fight with me in front of the Hollywood choreographer who agreed to help us for free. I even staunchly held on to the belief that when the wedding began, Paris wasn’t tearing up because of me and how stunning I looked, but because his mother and aunts were crying in the audience.

But I didn’t think about any of those things, dear Nurse. All I saw were two young people so desperately in love and excited about one another that they were willing to overlook faults. The problems that lay ahead. We knew the cards were stacked against us - two kids from “broken homes” with no money and no life plan - we knew it, but unlike Romeo, we didn’t give a shit. Marriage is a fucking crazy thing to do if you really think about it. It’s madness, and Paris may have been the only person I’ve ever known crazy enough to do it with me.


“It was a really nice wedding.” I said.


“It was the best.” He nodded, sucking in a breath.

I hung my head, unable to stop the tears now. All I could think about was the way we looked at one another. The elation on our faces when his cousin pronounced us man and wife. How I grabbed Paris, wrapped my arms around him, and kissed him like I never wanted to stop kissing him. How for so many years after, I hoped I’d never have to… and when I ultimately knew I never could again.


“I’ve said this whole time that I don’t regret anything.” I said.


“I know.” He said.


“Because of the girls, you know? Because they wouldn’t be here otherwise, and they’re so perfect.”


“I know.” He said again, bracing himself.


“But watching that video today… it made me realize it’s not just about them.”


He lifted his head, not expecting this.


“I’m really glad I married you.” I said.


He sucked in a quavering breath.


“I’m glad I married you, too.”


And I am, Dearest Nurse. I am.

I have been so steadfast about moving on to the next chapter of my life that I haven’t taken the time to mourn the one that is gone. Yes, there were parts of it that were not healthy. And those parts eventually metastasized and devoured us. But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t real, 100 percent, bona fide love there. The kind of love you read about in books. The kind that gets you out of bed in the morning, makes you sing in the shower, and want to be the best version of yourself. We had that. I had forgotten, but it was right there in that wedding video. In our smiles, our eyes, even the way we held ourselves that day. The love went right down to our bones.


I haven’t wanted to spend a single second being sad. All I’ve wanted to do is move on, move up. Get past the negativity and start living. But the truth is, it is sad. It’s really fucking sad, and if I don’t properly acknowledge that, then I’m not doing my job, here.

This is a habit of mine, cutting myself off from feeling so I can get on with things. Forcing sadness out so I can just get to the joy already. But if watching Inside Out with Big a thousand times has taught me anything, it’s that you can’t have joy without the sadness.

I’m glad I married Paris. I wouldn’t be who I am now if I hadn’t, and I am discovering more each day just how much I like me. And now, I think it’s finally time I start looking back on the good things. The moments that were fucking great. The parts of him I’ll miss. The moments he really did come through for me. I’ve spent enough time on the bad. I know why I’m getting a divorce and it needs to happen, but I can’t deny what was there. I can’t pretend it was all a giant shit show just so I can move on faster. I started the Juliet Anonymous Project to do the work, and by God, dear Nurse, with you as my witness, I’m going to do it.

So, get ready for tomorrow, because you’re about to see a whole different side of Paris.


Sincerely yours,

Juliet

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