for Y&B and G&R
wedding season
It felt for a while like what to be said of October but sameness and solitude, an excruciating boredom interrupted only by intolerable bursts of panic and pain. Sure, the leaves changing, sure the shapes of birds turning over as they migrate, rearrange. Sure, even the new rooms of a new apartment. All the same, from the mattress on the floor of the bedroom in which I had not yet built a bedframe, another day October like a death knell, or the rich anticipation of that bell tolling, anyway. And now instead the month hastens forward, things are beginning. This weekend and next I will spend at weddings, standing witness to the incredible and enduring reality of my friends’ steadfast loves. Yesterday I drove up into the Hudson Valley, and next weekend I will go with the other bridesmaids by taxi or lyft to the church downtown. There is a disorder of dresses in the hard yellow suitcase exploded on the bedroom floor in my parents’ Queens apartment, and I emerged triumphant from my old closet with an armful of shoes, leftovers to suit the first wedding, which I was still on track to attend unshod before I remembered, only vaguely, that I might have left heels behind when I moved.
As I drove north the cacophony was of leaf-colors, the broken-down molecules of chlorophyll unreplaced and the reds and yellows showing through. Outside the church next Saturday it will be the cacophony of people sounds and textiles, traffic and someone yelling something worth writing down. In the airport, a waitress at the California Pizza Kitchen telling the captive audience of her only table, “I have a very active dream life.” At the top of the subway stairs by the Queens Center Mall, where G and I spent long stretches of middle school afternoons, a man saying into his phone, “We won’t even save your seat in our imaginations.” Last week texting Y he still didn’t know what he would wear; G’s dress I saw months ago and, looking at it small on my phone screen, walked directly into a wall. Their respective fiancés I don’t really know, and it’s a springtime unfolding I imagine there, in the getting-to-know, when perhaps instead I should anticipate the dissolution of chlorophyll, the sharp and breathless realization of actual color, cutting shape distinctly out of the contrasting blue of the sky.
Book of the day: After the Fireworks by Aldous Huxley (only I can’t find my copy to finish it and it’s a library book so if you see it please let me know)
Look of the day: green off-the-shoulder velvet dress, silver and grey shoes, butterfly choker, probably too much eye makeup (that's mine anyway, B's is better, it goes without saying!!)
Film of the day: Murder She Said (1961)
Color of the day: Pantone 16-343 (Autumn Sunset)
When I moved to Salt Lake City it was this I anticipated missing most, this and the ocean—the leaving behind of the ordinary moments that led to these exceptional ones. I live now in a world of telephone calls and long text messages, spanning the highlights of weeks in-between. I get to know people and places second-hand and in still frames and we miss each other, not just feeling each other's absences but also slipping by unobserved, voicemails and dormant texts in our most strained seasons. I love from a distance and hope the distance cannot intervene in the transmission of the love.
Before the ceremony, I am four in a row with the people I know in a sea of people whose join to me is this accumulation of threads. What we have in common is a common love. What we know of each other is unknown meeting and the sustenance of our respective bonds, the tending of the various places where we find each other. This tenuous connection, the mutual held breath of our involvement in the lives the ceremony joins, is indeed enough to let us find each other, around a bonfire, over bagels. This weekend it is the actual radiance of Y and B that enlivens us, and that allows us to pass sparks of love not just to those we know but to everyone. Everyone a benevolent stranger. Easy to trust when what we trust in is the judgement of others, the happenstance accumulation and careful selections of this couple's cast of characters. Because we trust them it is easy to trust one another.
Next weekend I will stand in emerald green and watch G, the person I have known and loved the longest, marry R, whom I've met only twice. I know a slowly growing set of facts and stories about him, about their life together, about what they will make of their corner of the world. I will be full of joy and quietly mourning life as it has always been. She and I have always been each other's, and I feel myself assessing R quietly, making sure he is equal not to the task of loving her but to the joy of matching her—how one could fail to love in this case I cannot imagine, but easy to fall short of everything I am certain she deserves. Quietly, he meets my bars. There are final pages falling closed, the chapters of our lives before. But there are, too, the first illuminated letters of the chapter in which I get to know and love them both. R is a stranger I already love. My love is carried on hers, which I trust absolutely. R is a stranger with whom I will spend countless future afternoons and I am exhilarated by the imagination of life, as it grows, as it gives, as it glistens.
I painted birds for Y and B, birds and flowers, because there are languages therein that I'm certain I can access, certain they can read. Their favorite plants and the birds of the states they're from and the states where they've lived. Sunflower, fern, buckwheat, California quail, northern mockingbird, eastern bluebird, robin. The natural history of the places that have made them, the places they have made. As I painted I was thinking of the Rubblebucket concert Y and I discovered we were both attending by chance, the place I first met B, the place where he first referred to me as a friend. I was thinking that in recognizing the growing things they love I am capable of recognizing them, too, that the songs of each bird is a kind of code. It's too much to say. But I think there is something in this, making for them a representation of a tiny, fabricated, beloved ecosystem, as they commit to the tiny, fabricated, beloved ecosystem between them, held in their joined hands through the ceremony, with them as they circle through the reception tent. This is the world they have made, or contributed to the making of. I am made bright by living in it, like a bird at the top of a tree, like the sky behind the autumn leaves. Next weekend in another world I will have this bright one with me too, eyes focused elsewhere but loving, loving.