You may have been told that your wedding day will be the best day of your life. I sincerely hope it isn't.

[miss manners]

I will be her witness.
[joan didion]

-

I look down and see the envelope with Ivan's handwriting. He wrote down the name of a book he heard about while listening to a podcast and thought I might like. It's on the dining room table, under his keys. I feel the familiar flush of quiet joy, then on its tails, the refrain that has followed me for over a year. 

He is not someone I would choose to be in my life, she said. My friend, the woman I'd asked to stand next to me at my wedding. But what's good for you is good for you, and what's good for me is good for me. It was the night of my bachelorette party.

I watched some British show on botched plastic surgery a month ago. There's one image I can't get out of my head, a woman who'd had breast reduction surgery but then the tissue had died in a rare complication. The surgeon gently lifted away a bandage, and yellow slime oozed out from a cavernous hollow against her ribcage. I recognized it right away. An angry thing that will not heal.

What's good for you is good for you, and what's good for me is good for me. 

It's not the worst thing to ever happen to anybody. I know this. Why does it keep hurting so much? How could something that simple make me feel so small?

I felt sadness for the person I'd been earlier that day, overjoyed to be getting married, to feel like I was safe in the world at last, finally able to leave behind the pain and uncertainty of so much of my twenties. I would be thirty in a month, married in two. I felt proud, felt like someone worthy of respect. I remembered setting aside clothes that no longer fit that I knew this friend and my sister might want, planning to surprise them. This is going to be such a good summer, I told my husband-to-be, reveling in the fact that for the first time in years I felt like I was living a life I recognized.

Sitting on the bed at the hotel, that started to feel like a pathetic story I had been telling myself. She was on the offense, saying I hadn't kept her updated about my relationship the way I should have, saying I hadn't given her what she needed to be able to approve my relationship. I just felt like you didn't like him, I told her, feeling the tears build against the back of my eyes. I am five hundred percent certain I gave you that impression, because I got a weird vibe from him, she responded, an edge in her voice. He is not someone I would choose to have in my life. 

Where did that leave me? What should I say?

I looked down at the crumpled tissue paper under my foot. This was supposed to be my moment, my celebration, but all I could think of were the witch hunts. If she floats, she's guilty. If she sinks, she's innocent. 

I walked into the bathroom of the hotel room we were in, closed the door and leaned against it, felt myself sinking. I couldn't stop crying, so I just sat on the tile and kept at it, swiping at the toilet paper roll when I needed to. I didn't have an answer for her. It's not the sort of thing someone says to get an answer. It's the sort of thing they say just to make sure you know, to go on the record.

You are safe in this world, I told myself, a mantra I'd begun repeating to myself years ago whenever I got lost when I was hiking.

I remembered telling my sister years ago what I'd like for my bachelorette party, if I ever had one. Something small, intimate, we could just hang out at a coffee shop and talk, I'd said. It seemed so incredible and far away to me at the time, to be getting married, to have something like that to celebrate. It was the sort of thing other people did and I watched, not the other way around.

I thought about the first time I drove into Oregon. I was twenty-two. The road curved up a hill, through a stand of trees, their dappled shadows flying over my windshield, then I dipped down into the valley, and some part of myself said, Well, here we are. It wasn't good or bad, it was just mine, like that dream I have every few years about the house with all the rooms. It felt right.

One year later, I drove down a winding road to a farm in California that a friend of mine was working on. We had been having an on-again, off-again thing that had turned into something I wasn't ready for and didn't want. He was sweet, but immature, kind but painfully overeager, and I didn't want to date anyone, especially not him. I was twenty-three and all I wanted was to drive and drive and camp by the side of the road and listen only to the kind of music that makes you want to drive and drive and camp by the side of the road even more.

I wasn't sure how to say this to him, so I'd written him a letter saying that we needed to get some distance from each other. Driving to the farm, I was a wreck. I pulled up to the gate so he could let me in. When I looked up, I saw him walking down the road to greet me.

It's strange what images remain so powerfully, even as so many similar or more important ones drift away. One of the last things I will ever forget is how Ivan looked that day, striding down the road, his hair bleached lighter from working outside all summer, his ripped Bad Box t-shirt, the scruff on his jaw, his tanned skin, his smile. In that moment, I was reminded so powerfully of my father and to this day I don't know why.

And years after that, after we slowly made our way back to each other, I was surprised to find that whatever it was about the man he'd grown into, I could sum it up this way: I recognize you. I'm home. I could tell that he was mine. Like the dappled stand of trees, like the dream where I always find another room, another hallway just beyond. Not perfect, but beautiful, mine to explore.

Back in the bathroom at the hotel in Portland, almost ten years later, I closed my eyes. I knew I would not be able to explain this in a way that this friend would accept. He was not perfect and I could not credibly deny this. But why did I feel like I had to? Why did I feel like my heart was completely broken?

I remembered walking next to my two closest friends our junior year of high school. I was laughing about a boy who had made a clumsy pass at one of my friends. He likes you! I said, turning towards her, knowing that she liked him too. My mouth was still caught in a wide smile when she turned to me, looked me dead in the eye, and said Shut up, bitch.

I stopped. This friend kept walking. My other friend turned around just briefly, met my eyes for a moment, then looked down and kept walking away with the other girl. In the big scheme of things, what does that even matter? It wasn't Auschwitz. I'm thirty-one, almost twice as old as I was that day. My father is dying slowly from the inside out. Why do I even remember that moment?

But I have never forgotten that feeling. It confirmed something that I'd already felt the edges of. Sitting on the bathroom floor, all I could think was, why did you think you could get off this easy? 

I brought it up with that high school friend, years later. She was working at a hotel, the same job she'd had since she finally graduated from college. I forgot all about that, she laughed, and changed the subject.

Six years ago. I'm standing in the kitchen. Dad crosses his arms, tilts his body away from me. I hate the way you sound, he said. Why do you talk like that? You are so...He's stumbling over his words again. He can't find them quickly anymore. I feel the familiar blend of pity and love and fury. You're so smarmy. I walked outside, stood in the backyard, thought about his blank eyes. The light was coming through the oak tree. One of the dogs leaned against my leg. I thought about the tree house he built us when we were small, and then I watched the light and thought about nothing at all.

I found out about the dementia a year or two later. That's about as good an excuse as anyone can get. So why is my heart still cracked along that fault line? What was it about that moment? Your own father can't stand the sound of your voice.

I laid awake all night at the hotel, my sister and bridesmaid sleeping. Neither of them spoke to me again that night, except when my sister asked me to come help her with something. She handed me a tampon and asked if I could unwrap it for her. No nails, she said, gesturing with her gnawed cuticles.

You need to leave, some compassionate voice said inside my head.

I left the next morning, as early as I could. When my husband came home later that afternoon, he lit up at the sight of me, put his bag down. How was it, sweetie? he said.

The next day there were pictures on Instagram of my sister and the bridesmaid sightseeing in Portland after I left. In the first picture, they are laughing next to a Sasquatch statue, grins wide, looking just like they did years before when working at a summer camp in California. Girl's weekend, the caption read.

Three weeks later, I laughed alongside them both in my wedding pictures, because when the choice is between being the bride who is fake laughing or the bride with no one beside her at all, I am not brave or principled enough to choose the second thing. I just didn't want to be any more alone than I already felt.

The bridesmaid left for Seattle the day after the wedding and hasn't spoken to me since. We were friends for over a decade. Why does that hurt so much, still? It's been a year, a whole year. The fact that you're sad just means there's something wrong with you. This is your fault. You should have been cooler about the whole thing. You always need too much.

She invited my sister up for a weekend in Seattle shortly after the wedding, when my sister had moved in with me to save money and look for a job. Anne asked if I could watch her dog while she was away. Why would that upset you? Be cool. They would be cool about it if it happened to them, right? They posted a video to Instagram of them laughing, eating seafood with the bridesmaid's friends. I guess I wasn't invited, I said to my husband, trying for dark humor, but he only took me in his arms.

I was trying to explain to a therapist how that felt but the only memory that kept coming up was when Dad took a twenty out of his wallet, smoothed it against the edge of the table, and said I will give this to you if you stop talking.

He looked the same. He wasn't the same man who built the treehouse or who boomed Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum as my sister and I ran screaming down the sidewalk at the university or the one who said I am so proud of you in an email he sent seven years ago that I have read a hundred times. But he looked the same.

It cracked my heart just the same as if he was. I can't seem to fix it just by pulling up page after page of symptoms online for frontotemporal dementia and poring over them during my lunch break. Poor judgement. Loss of empathy. Socially inappropriate behavior. Lack of inhibition.

I remember sitting Dad down five years ago. Do you feel like you might be depressed? I asked. It was becoming so obvious that something was wrong that not even we could ignore it any longer. He was sitting on the couch adjacent to me. Mom was on my right. I remember being terrified and also knowing that we needed at least one person present to not be terrified, lest we all completely lose our minds. I also knew I was the wrong person to be asking him these questions but there was no right person. I don't know what's wrong. Something is horrible, he said. A few minutes later he said I feel fine. His hands were upturned on his knees, palms to the ceiling.

You are safe in this world.

I don't know why you would think I don't support you, said the bridesmaid several weeks after the bachelorette party.

I never said that, said Dad. I never did.

I forgot all about that.

When the bandage was peeled away, you could almost smell the rot through the television screen. Her eyes were green like mine and bright with tears. She couldn't bear to look at her own disintegrating skin. I wondered if the reality show was helping her with her medical bills.

The thing about rot isn't that it's scary, though it is. It's that it is humiliating. It exposes your fragility, the gross things that can make a home in you if the conditions are right, the vulnerability that other people can smell on you. It doesn't matter what the circumstances are. If someone loses their leg in a car accident, it feels like a tragedy. If the wound begins to rot, though, it feels a little bit like it's their fault. I never saw a patient whose wound had gone bad who didn't look ashamed.

There are people who will protect you in your vulnerability, and there are people who can't, or won't. The trick is, you're never sure which one they are until it's already too late.

My wounds have gone bad. Something inside me believes that it's my fault. Our friendship felt almost sacred for years, the three of us bound by over a decade of shared experiences, but in the end it would be just fine without me, the way water closes behind you when you rise up and out of it. Nothing important even happened. You're just too weird, too sensitive, too insecure. Too intense. You just misinterpreted everything. She was being compassionate, and you just aren't wise enough to understand. Even the fact that you are hurt proves something is wrong with you. If she floats, if she sinks.

I don't have the energy to come for anyone anymore. I can't save my father, my mother, make my sister feel better. I started seeing the therapist because I couldn't stop crying at work, which really undermines the whole nurse-patient relationship, as it turns out. It's a wail I've held in for so long that now I feel like I am only a wail with feet and fingers, while everyone else goes on with their days, normal people with normal bodies, happy wedding pictures, friends and sisters and fathers, all these things that are taken for granted.

Four years ago I was a bridesmaid in this same old friend's wedding. The week before the event was a blur of preparations. I remember helping her move from her old apartment into her new place with her husband. I remember cleaning her bathroom, folding clothes that survived the purge, lying on an air mattress at night wishing heartily that air conditioning was more of a thing in Seattle. On the frantic day before the wedding, she drove me and my sister to her new apartment, where we were spending the night. She put the car in park.

There was a moment when it was quiet, before we got out of the car. I was in the backseat. I knew she was scared. The air felt that way, like the breath you suck in before you howl. I touched her arm. How are you doing?

She started crying. She didn't speak for a while, she just cried. I put my arms around her as best I could in a Volkswagon, and a beat later my sister did the same.

I saw an empty basket on the seat in front of me. Here, I said. Put all your thoughts in this basket.

She said every single thing she could think of that was frightening her, exhausting her, exciting her, and then that was it. We went inside and left the basket in the car, to mull things over.

She's probably forgotten this. Neither of them had probably thought about it since. It was one small moment in the midst of one of the wildest weeks this friend has probably ever had. But I thought about it over and over again in the weeks leading up to my own wedding.

It made sense to me that she was feeling all of those things. At that time, there was almost nothing I valued more than my own independence, even as I deeply hoped I'd someday get married too. I tended towards being judgmental, even as I relied on grace for my own many shortcomings.

I understood being so happy to join together with another person and also being terrified in the face of making one of the biggest and most permanent decisions of your life. I understood being completely safe and happy in your own world, and also afraid that no one else would see what you saw. I completely understood wanting to be celebrated and also wanting to wait over the next hillside, out of sight, until the whole thing was over. I understood.

I cried the day before my wedding too. I locked myself in the bathroom, ran the water in the sink. My husband would have held me if I'd gone to him, but it wasn't my husband that I needed in that moment. I didn't realize how deep this need was, for women to witness me, to come alongside me. A year later, I can't forgive myself for having it, when I was seventeen or when I was thirty.

The day I got married was the last day my father recognized me, I think. He touched my arm as I walked down the aisle with my mother. He wouldn't have done that if he didn't know who I was, know that I was important to him. I don't take that for granted.

My first anniversary with my husband was two months ago. We spent it at the coast, sleeping in a sweet little beach house with white curtains and wide plank floors. During the day, we walked everywhere, scouting for shells, shrieking at the cold seawater, exploring small bright shops and used bookstores. It was beautiful but I felt haunted in the quiet moments. What if she's right? What if my worst fears are right? What if there's something wrong with me? With us? What if we fail? 

We might. Nothing is certain. But I feel like I'm on the edge of something else, a year later. Maybe it's something good, or maybe it's just something different. I can't feel a bottom to whatever this is but I can imagine what it feels like on the other side.

On the other side of I love you, but you're just not worth it, or I love you, but I reserve the right to hurt you at will, or I love you, but anything and everything I do to you is your fault or I love you but my brain is rotting and I didn't really know how to do this even back when my brain was still fine, or I love you, but I'm so worried about what everyone else thinks, how everyone else is doing, what everyone else might want from me. On the other side of You are not safe in this world or any other.

Maybe I'm on the other side already, tentatively, a hand against the wall.

I think of Ivan calling out Sweetie bean! when he opens the door, home from work. The lilt of it. The way his hair sticks up with dried sweat, the way he squeezes my hip with one hand, braces the second against my back. When we fall asleep at night, he squeezes my thigh, says Good night, beautiful, and then a singsong See you in the morning-time, a line from one of our favorite songs.

I think of the joy at our wedding, despite the anger and sadness that crowded my heart. I think of my mother, how beautiful she looked as she married us. How there was not one moment in the midst of all this when she was not there for me. The tiny flower boutineer my mother-in-law saved and still has on the dashboard of her car, crispy and bleached with sun but still somehow fragrant. How my brother-in-law texted me on my birthday and said I am so glad that you are my sister.

He's not someone I would have chosen to be in my life. I try and try but I still can't imagine a universe where this would not have hurt.

I wish I had been wise enough to say, My story is different than yours, and that is not a threat or a disappointment to you or to me. I wish I had taken my own quiet joy in my upcoming marriage and my unimpressive, imperfect life and just spent the weekend in a coffee shop with a stack of good books. I should have spent it walking along the Oregon coast petting every dog that stopped to say hi. I should have spent it wrapped in the cliff of my husband's back.

Ivan knew everything, but still welcomed her with open arms at our wedding, the same arms that had held me a hundred times the month before.

I think about how I recognized something in him when he walked down that road toward me, all those years ago, when we were both wrong for each other, not at all ready, something that I can't name even now.

I told him about it a few months ago, and without missing a beat he said Sure. I felt the same thing. Whatever it is.

Whatever it is. I read the book that he heard about on his podcast and wrote down, carefully, on the slip of paper. I loved it. When I told him this, he smiled.

There is nothing certain. There is only life. I reach my hand out, tentatively. The wall's still there.

I keep walking away from it, the conviction that I am responsible for all the pain in my life, that I should be punished for wanting more, for pushing for clarity, for reaching for things like kindness, love, respect. For standing up for myself.

My father was hurt but that does not mean that I deserved to be. My friend was hurt but that did not mean I deserved to be. It happened. It mattered. I matter.

I don't know much but I know that now, in a way I didn't before. It's the wall against my hand, the boundary that I won't cross again, the base against which I push off, in new territory. Trusting again. Towards whatever the better thing is.