life is more than a dress rehearsal

If the real truth is found in silence, then I have been more honest with you, Reader, in the past six months than ever before.

 
The real truth is that I am a small person whose life can only be witnessed by the few who jostle for proximity. The real truth is that I have so much to say and with such feeling that the utterance seems to cheapen it by dilution.

 
Reader, I am marrying a man. I am marrying the man that I want, the man that I dreaded because he was too perfectly my inner soul’s desire and threatened to make my life happier than I felt it had a right to be. Happiness is for the weak, for those who close their eyes to the sorrow of the world, for those who will not sit in silence and bear up under it alone, for those who are Human and not Atlas.

 
I forget that I am human, Reader.

 
And furthermore, I forget that grasping happiness though it runs through your fingers and linking arms with a person though they walk at a different pace and relinquishing sole proprietorship to another gloriously faulty spirit—these things are brave. These things are beautiful. These things make the universe mean something more, even if you are only dressing up entropic atoms with sentiment. I choose the sentiment. I choose to feel.

 
I get angry because I wasn’t watching the road and slammed on breaks and food and papers and shoes and jackets and books have careened into the crumb-crusted carpet of my dying Toyota.

 
I get surprised because my family and friends actually left their comfortable homes, got into their cars, drove into the scary ITP, huddled silent and sweaty in a spare room, and celebrated our engagement with wine and cake and stories and hugs and tears and letters and laughs.

 
I get overwhelmed that the logistical felicity of 35,000 ticket-holders depends on my dexterity with Excel, Adobe, iPhone, vehicle, GPS, small talk, Outlook, clothing shopping, and getting a good night’s sleep (at which I suck).

 
I get sorrowful because I miss my close friend and all I could think about while I listened to him tell his story about moving across the country is how much I will miss him when he is gone and how talking on the phone isn’t the same as accidentally bumping into each other when you readjust in your seat across the booth or as squeezing each other tight when you say goodbye with a hug or as seeing what’s really happening inside the face though the words sound normal enough.

 
I get jealous of my beloved because I want to forge a fairy-tale home for him that is cool in the summer and warm in the winter and pleasing to the eye all year round and brimming with the hearts of people who love him and need him and respect him and teach him and hear him and sometimes my best-laid plans are corrupted by my own need for him to build me a fairy-tale home that is always the right temperature and situated in a convenient location and full of furniture that doesn’t make you sore after a three-wine-glass conversation.

 
I get proud of myself for acting like an adult, which basically means that you keep on acting even if you don’t hear applause or get a review (let alone a good one!) in the paper or get the contract renewal before the current one expires.

 
Life has been extraordinary to me and it’s filled my little clay plate with a helluva lot more tasty and prickly food than it can manage, and I don’t ever want to give the impression that I am insensible to that bounteous fact. But sometimes, standing there without saying anything, just holding your plate with both hands in front of you and your face turned down so you don’t trip while you’re walking—sometimes, the silence is all. Thanks for listening.