Remains of the day

I realized, somewhat late in the day, that today would have been my seventeenth wedding anniversary. We've been separated/divorced for seven years, but this date hit me hard for some reason.

Sometimes I think about our marriage in terms of what remains from it. Obviously and most significantly, there's Crash. I get caught up on stupid stuff, though. I still have a battered metal bowl that we used to always use for popcorn while we watched movies in our little house in Orlando. Almost every time I use this stupid bowl, I think about the fact that this survived most of our courtship, and all of our marriage. Which on one hand is not surprising, because it's a fucking metallic object, made of metal. But memories and nostalgia and shit.

Today was also a little harder because I got off work, with the realization in my brain that today was our former anniversary, and realized it was seven o'clock. So, exactly seventeen years previously, I was hand-in-hand with my dad, veil billowing in a Florida breeze, about to walk down the aisle.

At least that's how my thoughts were running. Possibly, and more likely, my bridesmaids were still churning around in their standard late-1990s-issue empire-waist, aubergine dresses, waiting to precede me. I was still probably hyperventilating.

Memories from my wedding day: I remember that I woke up at six o'clock or so. We were staying at a hotel adjacent to our venue, and I went down to the pool and read about 3/4 of The Deep End of the Ocean, which I had pilfered from a bridesmaid's bag. Because I read fast, it was still early when I got bored. I went up and knocked on the door where my nieces were staying, and my niece Melissa came to hang out with me. We went to a local restaurant and she had breakfast while I began a slow spiral to insanity.

Later Melissa and I went and paid for some trees/plants to decorate my venue.

We checked on my venue. I hyperventilated.

We checked on my centerpieces. I hyperventilated.

We met up with the other maids, and got our hair done. The first version of my hair was a shellacked bouffant that Tricia Nixon might have sported. I hyperventilated. When my recovery from this round was prolonged, Melissa offered the information I had not eaten anything all day. I then ate a bagel with cream cheese, improbably procured from the bar in the same strip mall. Then I made the hairdresser take my hair down a few notches.

My brother drove me and the 'maids from the hairdresser to the venue, in his minivan. On the way, he cheerily remarked, "Wow! All this big hair! I feel like I'm chauffeuring a bunch of Alabama cheerleaders!" I did not hyperventilate, but did hit him with a shoe. 

Very shortly before walking down the aisle, my nieces were practicing some ridiculous slow, swoopy walk to go up the aisle, and I (as the classy bride I apparently was) yelled at them to walk like normal people. Then we walked down the aisle, to Enya. I regret nothing.

Speaking of no regrets, I don't regret or mourn my divorce, but I do sometimes miss the guy I married. However, he doesn't exist anymore -- and to be fair, the girl he married doesn't exist anymore. Few artifacts have survived from the time when that guy and that girl were completely in love and happy. One of them is a cheap metal bowl.