Send Me Your Flowers, Of Your December, Send Me Your Dreams, Of Your Candy Wine, I Got Just One Thing I Can't Give You, Just One More Thing Of Mine

--"Flowers in December", Mazzy Star

It looks the gods of fate have conspired against me. I spent the good portion of my morning at work hashing out plans with Marion and her sister Nora to fly over there in June. It seems little (well, maybe not so little since she's almost in her mid-twenties) Nora is finally getting married. Of the three sisters, I know Nora the least but she obviously feels she knows me well enough to invite me to her big day. I don't know--personally I could have gone either way. I'm more of a friend to Toby and Faye, and it'll be nice to see them while I'm over there, but I have a lot of reservations about this whole plan.

One, I'm going to know only Nora's immediate family. Everyone else is going to be new for me. That's going to put me at quite the disadvantage with everyone else there, who'll all be classmates, friends of the family, relatives, and other acquaintances who have bumped into each other probably more than once.

Two, I have mixed emotions about people getting married. I never know how to feel for them. I never know if I'm supposed to feel overjoyed at their happiness or guilt that I haven't stepped up my efforts to settle down with someone. Truthfully, at most weddings I feel overwhelmed by jealousy. I start asking myself questions about why that can't be me and how other people do it. How do other people manage to hang onto a relationship that long without fucking it up? Frankly, most weddings put me in a bad mood because I always end up on the losing end of the comparison.

I basically come out of most weddings thinking it's one of the most beautiful acts two people can commit together and that it's also one of the most damnably melancholy ceremonies I've ever ended attended. That strange brew of happiness and sadness, completion and longing, usually makes marriage and everything involving marriage melancholy affairs for me. They're like precious artifacts locked behind glass, preciously exquisite but inevitably out of my reach.

I can take it in all right, I just can't take it with me once it's done. And I definitely could never hope to give it away to someone else.

Three, and most importantly, the trip is going to cost me about a thousand to fly out there, stay the week (like I promised Toby I would last time I was in Louisville), and fly back. That's going to put a serious damper in my plans to fly out to Atlanta in April. It's not that I couldn't afford it, but I'm used to only vacationing once a year. One of the two trips, if I decide to go on both of them, is going to feel extraneous. I'm going to feel particularly self-indulgent, like I should have saved the money I spent on the other trip, especially in these economic times.

And yet I can't turn down a wedding invitation. I've never been able to do that. If they felt I was that important to invite then I feel obligated to show up. It isn't like Nora and I aren't on friendly terms. I just didn't think that I was close enough to be invited. And now that I have I'd feel awful if I turned her down. This isn't a case of being pressured into doing it because my family insists I go. The only person putting pressure on me is me (well, me, and the youngest Frisson girls). This will be one of the few weddings where I honestly can say I kind of want to be there. Most other weddings I'd rather not be there because, honestly, the people involved don't matter that much to me.

This feels different, though. This feels like someone in my family is getting married. Hell, this feels like someone closer than my family is getting married because the majority of my family I couldn't care less if they got married or not. Aside from the whole siphoning funds away from the Atlanta trip, I see only good things arising from this wedding. And, for once, I can see myself having a good, if not great, time there.

I want to go.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers