photo from personal files
I would be totally remiss in the telling of my story if I omitted this next part: my wedding day. I hate to even think about it. I am embarrassed when I do, not only for myself, but for my ex-husband. We were too young. Too naive. Too sheltered. We were too rebellious in our own hearts, too wild in our thinking, too against-the-grain for the outcome to be anything but what it is at this very moment. Our wedding was beautiful but there were red flags left, right, and centre. I blame no one. We were young. We did our best. We triumphed in all the ways that count. We move forward and we move on.
But in my mind, tonight, I am marvelling at the way things come back around. My wedding day was a fiasco bar-none in all the ways that count, too. I knew deep down it was not a good idea for us to marry, though we approached the whole thing sincerely enough. But the other red flags came in the form of an ex-boyfriend making an utter nuisance of himself the day of, crashing the event as if it were merely some highschool dance he forgot about until last minute. So typically oblivious was he. As much as I would love to have put it all behind me, I don't really know how to do that. After all, isn't your wedding day supposed to be the most important day of your life? I always thought so, growing up. I fantasized about a fairy-tale wedding as much as any other young girl did, I will admit. But mine was no fairy tail. It was a tale of deception. I know that most of the people involved were not too sure about us getting married, but had hope. We had hope too. But aside from the ex crashing the event, and thereby staining my memory of the day with a sickly indelible ink, there was also another voice that fed the dissidence. It was that of a guy who has become a lifeline to me in this fucked up world, more than once. Pardon my language.
He gave us a really hard time when we first got married. He uttered words that burned themselves into my psyche like a hot iron. He accused my ex-husband of becoming "domesticated" and I had never heard that word before in my life, but the context of the assault was doubly cutting. I was building my home as his words were tearing it down. This man turned out to be a nemesis of sorts, for years. We hated each other. Seethed, in fact.
But on the other side of hate there is something awfully close to love and I ended up falling over towards the love side of things, despite my best efforts to do otherwise. Why, you may ask? It was because of this one thing; of the three men that had entangled themselves in my life, he was the only one who dared to step forward and confront the truth of the whole thing and the only reason he would ever do such a thing is because he genuinely cared for me and my ex-husband while everyone else was approaching the situation from a more self-interested stand-point. This particular guy never did that. He simply expressed his distaste for a match that he seemed to see as problematic from the get-go. Had I listened a little more closely to his misgivings, I may have saved myself a world of pain over the years. As it was, his words cut so deep. I bled and bled and bled. I could not let his words go for the sake of the truth within their intention.
Later on in life, he crossed my path for a second time and it was something that seemed to shatter the very foundation of my heart. He got under my skin because when he touched me, he seemed to treat it as a privilege, even if the gesture was a slight grip on my arm. He was not so much a diamond in the rough, but rather a deep-red ruby embedded within the forest floor of my mind. Fascinating and curious and rare, rare, rare. An equally infuriating and baffling mystery. How could this be? I lost sleep. I cried real tears. I felt genuine gain and loss.When he spoke to me, he looked me right in the eye. My ex-husband was never as direct nor were his emotions ever as accessible. Whatever the chemistry was, it rattled me to my core. We chose to walk away for the sake of all involved, but it was painful.
But here we go again, a third time. A brand new chapter. A lifeline for me in an otherwise vast and lonely sea of bewilderment, yet an answer to a prayer that rang out so clearly within me so many many years ago. What is it with this guy, I asked myself, is he some sort of lighthouse or something?
All these things combined caused me to resent my wedding day and so, as a consequence, I turned my wedding dress into some sort of bizarre and thoroughly morbid art project. I expressed my shame and anger upon the fabric of what was supposed to represent my purity and innocence. A part of me has never been innocent a day in my life.
I burned the dress in the summer of 2020 (ashes to ashes, dust to dust) and though people have assigned a variety of meanings to that event, what I know in my heart is this: I burned it because this man (in the painting) held absolutely no hesitation in pointing out everything in the entire world I was doing wrong and though it was painful to be scrutinized to such a degree, I will admit it felt pretty damn good to know someone could see me in a world where I felt otherwise invisible.
The above photos are of my wedding dress as art project (the spoils of war). My ex-husband was very jealous of our friendship, and understandably so. It was heated, to say the least. The closest I ever came to cheating on him, but didn't. He said it was like two sexual titans going toe-to-toe. I laughed when he said that. But all is fair in love and war, so they say. So be it. As for my beloved T- man? He's most certainly of The Order of the Dragon and I have always loved him, somehow.
. Art imitates life. A portrait of T(__): The Firestarter. Third time's a charm.
Comments
Post a Comment