Recently I was invited to a wedding, and you’re the first to know – no set date, but I guess this is when you wonder where you’ve been for the past five years.
I mean, of course you know, but you wonder if it really was all that much. And of course whatever you do doesn’t necessarily matter in the grand scheme, though being a schemer makes for some novelty. And some novelty makes for some blood-injected narrative to siphon.
Stepping out of the Present (best advised to only look 24 hours ahead if you got the discipline) to contemplate all of the tuxedo faces I probably will struggle to recognize – maybe you’d know: facing a familiar face to pop out the memory mold mid-sentence with its protruding forehead creases and crow’s feet. Superimposed upon freshman morning, first meeting.
I’m eating a salad. I usually eat salads every night. Cherry tomatoes quartered, avocado (or two) with some watercress, some arugula, and the Spring Mix vat you’ll spot in your Walmart vegetable aisle. Lately I’ve been drizzling lemon and olive oil, but variety diminishes quickly in enough passing. Anyway, I was wondering if I was going to eat this for the rest of my life. And then stammer on about how there’s only a few things I can eat anymore because maybe it’s a tumor of control keeping me going.
Shave the head and fit on some plain button up, if it could be excused, if stupid sneakers could be excused too. Oh, what have you been up to? And that’s great, and well I probably won’t ever see you again. But that’s okay, I’m not the one handing the invitations. So nice to meet you – I’ll get a flight out to anywhere from here, and maybe that’ll serve as the excuse.
A marriage filled with people I’ve never met, or they’ve changed dramatically, and we were supposed to be good friends, but it’s not surprising when you hole yourself up because isolation is effective and people are painful, or an ingredient of painful self-awareness. Back then it felt like only when you’re forgotten could you forget yourself.
There’s no matching marriage in store for years or more, no best man to phone, but even if there was, I think writing here is the closest I’ll ever get to love anyway. Because Bananafish was a universal biography. To think about an Eternity and how you’re disagreeing on coffee flavors, Sears catalog.
Was thinking about some edibles to get me through this. But it might spike some paranoia, and then I get so damn jealous of those who have some drug to retreat to. I don’t want to be conscious about anything when I’m there. So much so that I wonder if I could just somehow not go and just sever the bridge entirely. Do you think that’d be smart? I mean, it’s just so stupid if you think about – maintaining contact with people you only have a phone call with once a year. Why do they have to believe in marriage of all things?
Surely they have the same dreads. I wonder why we all collectively put ourselves through these dreads. Golden days are putrid aren’t they? A stated resignation from today, perpetually. “Best days behind you” – may as well hand over the your-life-highlights brochure to each person you meet then. I guess that’s instagram. I guess that’s marriage planning.
It’d be nice to have a separate invitation for a random Autumn day, driving up and getting a hotel to walk around shopping malls. Talking much of nothing and agreeing this is all we need for the rest of our lives.
But instead I gotta share my nametag and stat updates like a guild meeting but it’s all so extortionist that it’s best to pretend to be a life-review journalist. I hope I can be such a journalist for the rest of my life. And this wedding is the debut for a lifelong career of eyebrow raises and tapping a pencil in anticipation. Churning out a catalogue of faces I’ll never live with and looking at the space between the words to wonder if they’re hiding the same things in their exaggerated smiling.