Just a warning, I try to spell check my things, but sometimes it may not be perfect. If this bugs you, I'm sorry. I'm not getting paid to do this, so unless YOU want to pay me, or edit for me, I don't really care. I also plan on updating as frequently as possible. I'll always warn you - if I can - if for some reason there will be a lag in posting. Some things I can't predict, but if I know I have a busy weekend coming up, or a vacation or whatever, I'll give you a heads up. I also suck at the whole html dealio, so I can't promise it'll look pretty either.
I'm ALWAYS open to suggestions, I'm also always open to other things, like book suggestions, other fictional blog suggestions. I have a few suggestions of my own, if you're interested.
So I guess that's all. Here's the first post.
The little icon sat blinking on the screen. It had been there for days, and I just hadn’t had the courage to click it. I don’t know when I became so terrified of a little envelope icon. This one I avoided as if I knew it contained anthrax. Which, I guess, in a way, it did contain a certain type of poison.
Envelopes had become my enemy ever since I received that heavy cream envelope in the mail a few months back:
Wish to invite you to witness
Two hearts join as one
As their daughter
Kayla LaCrosse
Marries
Jason Blanco
I stopped reading at that point, my mouth running dry, my head spinning, blackness creeping into the corners of my vision. I flung down the invite like it had burned my finger. Yeah, that’s when my fear of envelopes had started.
Of course I knew he had proposed. He was my best friend, I knew before he had even asked, before she had even said yes. There had even been talk of me being in the wedding party.
“Well, all these guys are becoming man of honor, or whatever. They even made a whole movie out of it. Why can’t you be my best woman? You’ve always been my best girl.” He had said.
My heart broke. If I’ve always been his best girl, than why wasn’t it me that he was marrying? I had convinced him that some of his other guy friends would be crushed if he picked me over them. I may have known him best, but they, knew him longer. In truth, I didn’t want to see this marriage at all, yet alone have a front row view.
However, even though the news of the proposal had disturbed me, there was always hope. Hope that she’d say no. Hope that he’d chicken out. Hope that one, the other, or both would call off the wedding. But with every step, from him picking out a ring, her the dress, planning floral arrangements, music arrangements, a honeymoon… It just became more and more official. And while I still held out a sick, twisted hope that there was still time for them to call it off, for some reason that invitation was just one final nail in the coffin. The last chance I had was the actual wedding, that one of them wouldn’t show.
In the end it was me who didn’t show. I drove all the way to Indiana, participated in the rehearsal dinner, and the morning of the wedding, I was the one who got cold feet. I called, faking a sore throat, and said as much as I wanted to be there, I didn’t want to risk getting either of them sick before their honeymoon. I packed my bags and headed home, the slinky, sexy, expensive dress I had planned to wear to catch Jason’s eye still encased in plastic, it’s tags still attached. That dress hung in my closet, like a rain cloud. Like a bad omen. Like a reminder of what was and what wasn’t.
The envelope icon on my desktop was from an email his sister had sent me. Professional pictures of the wedding would take weeks to come in, but his helpful little sister, bless her heart, felt so bad about me missing the wedding that she had taken it upon herself to take pictures and email it asap.
“It’ll be like you were there!” She had explained, when I called to cancel.
It wasn’t her fault. Had it been his older sister, Jen, who sent me the pictures, I would have no doubt that her intentions were malicious. Her intentions were ALWAYS malicious. But, his little sister, Erin, was clueless. Sweet, beautiful, simple, dumb Erin. I loved the girl like she was my own sister, but she was like that adorable puppy that kept chasing it’s own tail. The one you could fake throw a stick for over and over, and she’d still take off like it was flying through the air. She’s not observant, she doesn’t catch on to things. Clueless is her middle name. I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to see. And now that icon had been sitting on my desk for days. Worse yet, I had gotten a follow up email this morning, asking me what I thought! And wasn’t Kayla’s dress gorgeous! And the ceremony was so lovely! It was just perfect!
I needed to formulate SOME sort of response. I was always so bad at knowing what to say, cookie cutter responses always sounded so foreign in my mouth. I felt the need to explain in too much detailed, and ended up sounding awkward and fake. But, I knew that if I remained silent, someone would guess that something wasn’t quite right. Even sweet, clueless Erin would soon be plowing me with emails like “What’s wrong? Are you mad at me? Did I do something?” I wasn’t friends with Jason for over a decade only to one day up and just vanish from his life, especially right after he married.
People didn’t know though, that Jason and my relationship had been cracking and splitting for the last couple years. That’s what also made this hard. Yes, I love him more than I’ve ever loved anyone else. Yes, I was sure that I was the one who was supposed to be with him. But even more so, I felt like this was the end for us. I wouldn’t be calling him at four AM anymore because I simply couldn’t sleep. We wouldn’t be having anymore of our five hour rambling conversations about nothing. There’d be no spur of the moment road trips. No sleeping in the same bed, cuddling and whispering to each other.
My best friend of the female form, Toni, told me I should just delete the pictures. She said I should just shoot off some generic hallmark card reply.
“It’s not that hard.” She had said. “Everyone always says the same thing about weddings. They bride looked beautiful. The ceremony looked lovely. They looked happy together.”
The last part turned my stomach a little. They looked happy together? Did they really? How could he look truly happy, with anyone but me?
Which is why I felt like I needed to see the pictures. I still didn’t want too, I was still deathly afraid of that envelope, but I felt like if I didn’t look at them, I never would have believed that he was really with someone else. Happy, with someone else. And I’d spend a number of sleepless nights wondering what if, and if onlys. Tricking my mind into thinking that someday, he’d wake up and realize, and if I just held on long enough… I had to see them. I had to be the one who broke my own heart.
I wanted to take a shot of liquid courage before hand, but it seemed so cliché. I took a deep breath. And clicked.
It was worse than I could imagine. The pictures were not that great of quality… A finger in the lens here, a blurred face there. But there was no denying how gorgeous Kayla looked. And the way Jason gazed at her… Well, there was no denying that, either.
I could feel my heart crack. I could literally feel it freezing up and breaking piece by piece. I thought I could hear it breaking, a low, deep moaning. It took me a second to realize that the moaning was coming from my mouth.
2 comments:
that is so sad!! :(
I have been there, it hurts.
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