Have Wedding Gown, Will Travel

Picked up my wedding gown today, that was an interesting experience. Now you might be saying asking "Why do YOU have a wedding gown?" Valid question. Quick answer - I was engaged to be married to a lovely woman, in reliance upon our planned nuptuals she ordered a wedding gown as brides to be tend to do, we broke up - hence no need for a dress, bridal shops, however, aren't big fans of cancelling orders for wedding gowns despite break ups, as such the dress had to be paid for, as I am the one who cancelled the wedding, I paid for the gown. I wasn't expecting to pay for the gown, in fact, in the grand scheme of cancelling the wedding, ending the relationship, moving out of the shared apartment, dividing our belongings, dealing with the expected and unexpected emotional issues, the family issues, the guilt issues, etc ... I had not even thought of the wedding gown. Until, that is, a few months after the break up. A few months after the planned nuptuals were to take place. A few months after I had last scene and spoken to her.

She called - no, that's not right, she emailed. Oh email, praise be to god for your existance, allowing someone to communicate without vocalization, allowing someone to contact an ex-fiance and ask them to pay for the rest of the wedding gown they ordered and forgot to finish paying for but would rather not pay for now since the wedding is cancelled and it hurts to much to deal with. Thank you email. Thank you for that. So she emailed her request and I, wanting to be the "good guy" despite the whole "we should'nt get married thing" agreed to pay for it.

And I did, eventually. I had every intention of taking care of it right away, even called the bridal shop to tell them, in a nice way, to stop pestering the former bride to be because the wedding was over and I was assuming any and all responsibility for the wedding gown. I had planned to stop by the shop and take care of all business, but kept putting it off. Understandable I guess, I was looking for a place to live, re-evaluating my lot in life, explaining to people over and over again why the wedding was cancelled, why we broke up, why "yes we did try, we were in counseling for over a year," explaining why we were in couples counseling for over a year BEFORE we were married, and answering lots of well meaning "are you ok"? questions. So I put it off. And, I'll admit, in the back of my mind was hoping that the lady's who run the bridal shop would forget about me. Forget about the dress. Forget about the aborted wedding. "Keep the money that's already been paid for it" I thought, in that magnanimous way I have at times like these. Let's just forget the whole thing. And for a while everyone did. Until Christmas.

Yeah. As if the Christmas holiday wasn't interesting enough - first Christmas in years that she wasn't a part of my life, first Christmas that we were supposed to be celebrating as a married couple, first Christmas I was the only single person in my family (dad recently got engaged AND married ... funny). OK, so boo freakin hoo for me, I'm just setting the scene. Setting the scene for when the bridal shop called me to inform that I had to pay the balance of the dress ... half of its value .. or the matter would be referred to a collections agency. That would be great, have a collection agency hunt me down to pay for a wedding dress. Have my credit report reflect that despite my otherwise fantastic credit history, my overall credit was fucked for life because I didn't pay for a wedding dress that I did not want for a wedding I did not have. So I paid. Over the phone. With my debit card - using my debit card, I guess, to pay off not only a debt to the shop, but maybe, just maybe a bit of debt I had to her. So that's what I gave myself for christmas boys and girls, a wedding gown. A wedding gown that I was fairly certain at the time would never fit me.

So, flash forward to 6 months later. This month. June. Suffice it to say, I've gone through the "healing process." I'm "over it" so to speak. Even decided it was time to date, put myself out there, doing all right in that department. But I realized ... I own a gown, a wedding gown that I haven't picked up yet. Now I was aware this entire time that I needed to pick it up, even had a number of ideas of what to do with it ... burn it; wear it and go sky diving; frame it to display on my wall with a sign "never, never fucking again" (that was a suggestion from a friend of mine - divorced). I also thought, pick it up, sell it on ebay, use the money for something fun. I just never got around to it. But this month I thought, I'm gonna do it. Part of it was the lawyer in me .. it had been a year since the initial transaction - the ordering of the gown - and I thought that perhaps they could get rid of the dress after holding it for a certain amount of time. The other part was timing ... we were supposed to get married on June 19, 2005. So our upcoming non-anniversary was upon me and I thought ... time to close that door don't you think. Funny enough, right around the 19th she emailed me. She, the one who last spoke to me on Christmas eve and had to terminate the phone call after 5 minutes because she couldn't stop crying. She, who texted me (thank god for text messages just like emails, so easy to transmit information without actually transmitting intention or feeling no?) shortly thereafter to tell me that "its too hard" to speak with me, "it hurts to much." Despite countless offers to "talk" from my side of the vacant battlefield, she never took me up on it. Until last week. Until she emailed and asked if we could "meet for coffee," to "discuss things" to "get some closure." We didn't meet, by the way. The closure she was looking for, not yet available. My schedule didn't allow it. Could I have made my schedule bend to my will? Perhaps. But did I want to? Did I want to sit in a public coffee house with a woman who couldn't bare to speak with me on the phone for A YEAR so that we could discuss SOME THINGS and get CLOSURE? Not really. Will I? Sure, some day, not this month. I have my closure. Had my closure. Closed that shit up months ago with the help of some therapy of my own. And if she needs to meet for her closure, I'm happy to help, but when I WANT TO. The dress was the last act of reparations I was going to make. The last punishment gladly accepted for a crime of which I don't feel I was guilty of. I may have cancelled the wedding, but I had to, we had to, I was sick of being punished for it. And I get punished enough every time I go into Starbucks and pay for overpriced coffee I don't yet need to up the ante and feel awful all over again as I sip from my 5$ latte.

But the dress. It reminded me ... get the dress, get the gown, take the step. So I did. Today I drove to Tarzana - which, by the way, they should rename HELL as it was about 1 million degrees - and picked up my wedding gown. MINE. And it was a unique experience. The women at the bridal shop were very nice, but treated me as if my family just died and they didn't know how to speak with me. They were gentle, I could almost hear their forced whispers in the back room as they likely discussed "Oh, this is from that cancelled wedding .. he's here to pick up HER dress ... I wonder what happened?" When they brought the gown out, all zipped up in a lovely white garment bag bearing the former brides name and the former brides planned wedding date, they did so in a solemn like procession that reminded me a little of a funeral. It became much more funereal when they asked "would you like to see it?" Shall we open the casket and give you a glance? "No, thanks, I'm sure it looks like whatever its supposed to look like, thanks." I responded and tried to sound ok with that, and I was ok with it, wasn't I? The woman asked "should I take the name tag off of it?" Which was sweet, fairly unnecessary though, its not as if I forgot who it was for. Not like I was gonna give it to someone as a gift only to realize "shit, HER name is still on it." But the woman thought it would help, so I let her. She removed the tag from the dress. Whatever the desired effect of that gesture, however, it was muted, considerably, but the fact that the former brides name was still boldy emblazoned upon the garment bag - I removed that myself, later, for good measure. Finally, whe asked "so, is there any chance that the wedding will happen?" Which was a nice question to ask, I mean, here it was over a year from the scheduled date and I, the alleged groom, was picking up the gown ... but I answered her, honestly "Oh, no, I haven't seen her in a year." "I am so sorry" she quietly replied as she and her employee, shared a look of "poor guy" then looked to me with eyes saying "I hope your gonna be ok fella". "These things happen," I said, trying to sound sincere and "well-adjusted" at the same time. I think it worked, but who knows. Then I left. With my wedding gown, that will never fit me, that I just took an awful picture of, that I guess I'll sell. Eventually. Unless I can get myself down to a size 1. If I can, at least I know what I'm wearing for Halloween.

What I Miss

WHAT I MISS

When the relationship was in its downward spiral – when I saw the bad things out-weighing the good, when I kept telling myself “I love her but I can’t see this working out”– I thought the only thing to do, the only way to feel better, was to call it quits. Quitting isn’t the right word, it’s not a fair word, because quitting assumes we didn’t try. We tried. For over a year we tried to fix things, tried to shore up the weak points in our 3 and a half-year relationship, but when you’re living on a fault line, it doesn’t matter how sturdy the house, eventually things are going to crumble.
We didn’t just try to fix it by being nicer to each other – that was never an issue – or by setting aside “special time” - we didn’t rely on Dr. Phil or volumes of self-help books (though a couple of them came into the mix in the final countdown). No, we went hard-core – counseling. Some would say that marriage counseling before your marriage is not a particularly good sign, but we tried. We tried real hard. We tried to make something work that, in retrospect, couldn’t have worked. Not at this time in our lives. Not now. A conviction in love will make you do things like that, make you try to fit a square peg in a round hole, you just keep pushing and pushing and even though it looks like it could fit, it’s just not making it, you tell yourselves, “WE LOVE EACH OTHER, IT HAS TO FIT” only to find out later, despite the lyrics of countless songs, the lessons of numerous feel-good movies, that Love is NOT all that you need. Love doesn’t soften a square into a circle; it doesn’t sharpen a circle into a square.

The counseling helped, somewhat, but it didn’t provide any quick answers, it really just helped us see the differences we had, who was the circle, who was the square. And throughout the counseling, life happened, bringing its own little twists and turns, ups and downs -“challenges,” as my dad would say. My dad has a way of simplifying things; if someone has chronic illness, financial hardship, marital discord, legal problems, liberal tendencies – they have “challenges” or are “challenged.” That’s what we had, we had challenges. The relationship was over before we could admit it to ourselves, but once we saw it, we accepted it. We had no choice, it was over. But we didn’t quit, we didn’t give up - we lost.

When I was at that point, perched on the precipice, looking down at the relationship that was, the future that may be, the plans that would never come to fruition – it felt very, very dramatic - I couldn’t help but think that things would be better once we accepted that it was over. Sure it would suck, it would be sad, but wouldn’t it be better than the pain we felt? The pressure of squeezing ourselves into a master plan that just wasn’t shaped for us? I knew I’d miss her, miss “us,” but that detached, generic sadness, movie sadness, was all I thought about. I didn’t think about missing the little things, like sleeping in a bed.

You see, she took the bed. The couch. The pots. The pans. The plates. The cups. The glasses. The kitchen table. The matching chairs. The coffee table. The end table. The lamps. Almost everything, almost. She did leave the tv – the one I noted months earlier was on its last leg, much like we were I guess. She also left the love seat, though I think she left that because she didn’t have the room for it, or as a statement - leaving the love seat since the love was gone - but I’m pretty sure she didn’t leave it just so I’d have something to sit on.

Truth be told, most of the stuff was hers, originally. We did what most couples do when they move in together – we consolidated. Got rid of redundancies. For example - I had a bed, she had a bed, we only needed one bed, so we kept the better one and got rid of the other. In that case, we got rid of my bed. In fact, in each and every case, we got rid of my stuff. And that’s alright because her stuff was better than my stuff. But after living together for a year and a half, I’d stopped seeing things as “hers” or “mine” and had seen them as “ours.” Until, that was, she left, and I watched all of “our stuff” revert to “her stuff.”

Even some stuff that was truly ours (the kitchen set, the head board, the end table, the lamps, and the step stool) truly, legally, actually “ours,” purchased by us, for us: through the magic of relationship explosion those became hers too. Was I a bit angry that she took it all? Maybe. I did tell her to take whatever she wanted, whatever she needed. I was magnanimous that way. Thing is, she didn’t need much at the time, she was putting it all in storage and living with friends until she found a place. So she really didn’t need the kitchen set, or the bed or the step stool for that matter. What she needed, I guess, was to sever what was once hers from what was mine, and if that left me with nothing, so be it.

I wasn’t shocked when I came home to see what was left and what was missing. The living room looked much like it did the day we moved in, except for the feeble television set and the old “antique” desk which I bought for her at the flea market she dragged me too so she could refurbish it and make it a new, unique addition to our living space. That stayed, no longer new, not so unique and never, ever refurbished.

The bedroom was more disturbing. Only dust balls remained where the bed had once anchored the room. And the wall - there was the wall. When we’d moved in she’d gathered the best photos of ourselves, from our lives before we’d met, and made a sort of collage of the framed pictures on the wall. When she left, she took her photos, leaving a patchwork pattern of my life’s pictures interspersed with the ghostly empty spaces created by her leaving. A friend christened the wall “the Archipelago of Loneliness.” I didn’t take it down.

She left the inflatable mattress. That was good, because sleeping on a love seat is no fun. Then again, sleeping on an inflatable mattress every night is no party either. Those things are meant for camping, for short visits by spry young people, not an every night deal for a thirty-year-old. No matter how bad our relationship was, I didn’t think ending it would require me to blow up my bed every night. It’s an interesting feelingto blow up your bed, alone, late at night, and then to wake, the next morning, with your ass hitting the hard wood floor because the mattress has deflated – by at least 50%, every morning, without fail. Waking up that way, looking up at the Archipelago of Loneliness, I couldn’t help feeling deflated myself. Deflated and lost. And more than just a little bit sad. Not just “I feel sad,” but sad i.e., “this guy’s sad.”

It could have been worse; sleeping on an inflatable mattress was not as sad as sleeping with an inflatable girl. Although I could have done with the company.

Eating at home changed quite a bit, too. I still had groceries but I couldn’t do much cooking – as she took all the pots and pans. Even if I could have cooked, I didn’t have any plates, or any glasses. I guess I could have sat and eaten out of my hands. Thing was, I couldn’t really sit anywhere; she took the kitchen table and the chairs. As far as the love seat, sure, guess I could sit on that, but no coffee table, no end table, no nothing. So I didn’t cook. On the bright side, I didn’t have to worry about cleaning the dishes anymore.

But the break up didn’t only take away stuff I missed, it introduced me to new things, fun things, like: canceling the joint cell phone contract; paying off and picking up the orphaned wedding dress; finding the answer to the age old question – “can you return a wedding ring?” ; changing the joint auto insurance; canceling the renters insurance; canceling the wedding reception in Puerto Vallarta, only to hear that cancellations weren’t allowed; spending a long weekend in Puerto Vallarta and finding out that its called the “off-season” for a reason and that having a small resort practically all to oneself is not what its cracked up to be. But these diversions, fun as they were, didn’t change the fact that I missed everything else and that what I really missed, most of all, no matter how I fought it, was her.

It took me a number of weeks to realize that. Once I got past the shock, the anger, the other residual bullshit that rises from the depths of a failed relationship, the “challenges,” – the fun! – what I really missed was her.

I know the relationship ended because it had to. We didn’t cheat on each other or treat each other badly or do anything like that; it just wasn’t going to work. And I know that, I’m sure of it. Doesn’t change the fact that I miss her. I miss her more than the bed, more than the kitchen table, more than the couch. I miss not being able to call her at any time – because she won’t take my calls at any time. I miss not knowing that there was someone, not just anyone – her - waiting for me at the end of the day.

And that’s the kick in the pants. When things were bad and I knew it had to end, I couldn’t imagine just how much I’d miss her. How lonely things would be. How I have to fight every day, all the time, to keep from calling and trying to “work it out.” Cause it can’t be worked out. Would it be great to see her? It would. And for a couple of moments, days, weeks, maybe we could convince ourselves that things would work out, until the next tremors came and the cracks resurfaced. It’s like Pet Cemetery - you think you can bring your loved ones back from the dead, you think everything will work out fine, but the fact is you can’t. Dead is dead. Gone is gone. One minute you think you’re back in love and the next minute the love of your life is eating your brains – or something like that. I can’t make the “let’s get back together” call. I can’t do that to myself. Can’t do it to her. Really, can’t do it to her, and I don’t think she’d take my call anyway. Which is best, saves us both the heartache. You know the saying; if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it? Here’s a better one: If it is broken, and you’ve tried to fix it, and it can’t be fixed … it can’t be fixed. Let it go.

So, I let it go. But I miss her. I miss us. I miss it. I’m dealing with it. Still going to counseling, but not couples counseling – as there is no couple. “Just me” counseling. Getting my head together, getting “in touch” with my loneliness … you know, fun stuff. Realizing it’s ok to miss her, it’s ok to feel bad, that hopefully I’ll stop feeling bad after a while but that I’ll probably never stop missing her. I’m sure of that part. Sure of it. Least I’m not blowing up my bed any more. And as far as blowing up dates, I’m not that lonely. Yet.