For the first time in my life I am watching the hit television program Sex And The City. As I sit and watch Carrie Bradshaw, a writer, have her 35th birthday single and alone surrounded by her friends, I am held by the timelines of the similarities that we share. Charlotte says Don’t laugh at me but maybe we could be each other’s soulmates. I sigh, yes. This.
Last weekend I had the honor of attending my former spouse’s wedding, an experience that is beyond words or this lifetime. To sit and to ask god - what might I say about this way of being alive? How might I share how seamlessly I can let love in while also wondering what it is I am missing?
Carrie looks at her friends on her birthday and says : I am thirty five and alone.
It is from this same place that I write.
From All Sides by Bernadette Mayer her hand's on her hip she looks, maybe down the window trembles she looks down while the window trembles but she's become a tree out of her head comes a tree that begins at the roof safest place to be is the past
There is both everything to say and nothing to say. I was married once. We were married to each other. And then, three years later to the day, half a decade in, we got divorced under a tree next to the pool and ate Indian food for dinner, just like we had at our wedding.
Looking back I think I was in a manic stupor the whole time, not really registering what could possibly be happening or what could be ending. In some ways the reason I know this is because I don’t remember being anxious or particularly sad, but I also don’t recall being dissociated. This usually for me would be a sign of manic expression through swift movements.
Our wedding was on a farm, theirs was at an old Girl Scout camp. People who I knew from before I got married were there, people who attended our wedding, and people I’ve come to know after. I felt reminded of who I had kept in touch with and who I hadn’t, both riddled with guilt and sadness and also rejoicing in their company.
John’s mom read the most beautiful piece of writing during the ceremony with a quilt metaphor woven throughout and nothing could have delighted me more. It kept me in my own story and my own version of aliveness, even as an outsider looking in. Many of my own quilts are made from fabric she has gifted me over the years, some from my own wedding. My friendship to her stronger than ever, I felt so grateful to be held by her words about love and tenderness.
Actually one thing delighted me more than that, watching John be so in love. Watching him be so loved by Marie. Watching hundreds of people love them and believe in their love. I never once felt jealous or sad that we hadn’t made it work, perhaps because even throughout the engagement John had offered himself up for care and processing, which made space for so much presence in the day.
I did feel freshly single, sober, queer, dateless, divorced, and thirty five years old. I don’t mean that in a good way or a bad way. I just felt the weight of my identities, the weight of everything I am that brought me to that seat. The failed relationships I’d had of my own in the past seven years, the way John and I came back together to live platonically and run an artist residency in 2019, the way I now live in two places at once with one dog and many friends and no lovers.
Izzy held my hand and I laughed looking around at people I’d hooked up with in college, former cousins, the sun glaring in my eyes. I never cried, partly because I think I was sort of choosing to float above my body to feel safe, and partly because I didn’t feel extreme joy or extreme sadness, I just felt boundless peace.
I love love, and I left the weekend inspired to find it again. To find it in the non codependent way that John and Marie carve it out with each other. To find a fondness in recalling the love John and I shared, and now the way he shares it with someone so much better suited for who he is now.
I have been to two other exes weddings, but there is a specific feeling in watching someone take vows you once took vows with. I felt an unexpected glow of pride, like yes our love brought you to this love. Not in some way of being responsible for it, but in the way that when you love anyone it brings them closer to whatever they love next. What a blessing we keep finding people to love next and next and next.
The Friday night before the wedding me and Rachele drove up together. Arriving alone felt like a stretch even if I was glad to be dateless. Karaoke was on the agenda and I knew that would be a place to let my inner freak loose. I found Davey and Zach at the bonfire where Zach taught us how to read the moon and Davey explained duck hunting to me. I convinced them to come to the karaoke hang because navigating the terrain alone still felt precarious. I started out with Since You Been Gone, but really found my time to shine in my second song which was Any Man of Mine by Shania Twain.
Any man of mine'll say it fits just right
When last year's dress is just a little too tight
Sam told me I sang on key which was the first miracle of the weekend. The second was that all of the awkward or uncomfortable interactions, exchanges, or feelings I had rehearsed never happened.
What I didn’t expect to feel was jaded about love. This happened part way through the speeches and caught me off guard because even amidst my greatest heartaches I have always believed so deeply in love. I believe that there is more to come, more to be had, and that beyond romantic love there is always an abundance of platonic and queer love floating around us. But I had my moment under the tree with a gaggle of gays thinking, can love really be forever? Can I ever find even a sliver of this kind of magic again? I found myself believing in it for everyone else there, but not for me.
I turn here, to the art of the column, just like Carrie Bradshaw. Wondering if without love I will have enough to write about.
I had my eyes set on a few people to perhaps have a wedding weekend fling with, but instead what was most nourishing was my pre ceremony canoe trip with Sam, learning how to be in the front and help steer around sharp corners. We celebrated their new hope around love, grief of losing people, and the waves of transitions before we’re ready. It was yet another reminder that the way I find companionship and true love is not always through sexual romance, but the romance of a canoe ride. The person who had played music while I walked down the aisle was now steering me through the lily pads, full circle, full spiral.
Jamie and Brenin were just ahead of us in a canoe and Elisabeth in a sport kayak, and as we caught up we all started singing Chattahoochee at the top of our lungs.
I never looked to see if there was a wedding registry, and I didn’t attend as an ex wife but as a community member and dear friend. I worked on a quilt all week, my first wedding quilt, to celebrate this love and the community that surrounds it. I found that each stitch, each pass of the needle, brought me closer to myself. This is what love does, it doesn’t just invite us to shine a light on the partnership in question, but to shine the light back on our own true nature. The love that requires no one else but ourselves.
In our vows we never said til death do us part, but we did promise to always be family. There are few loves in this lifetime that have carried me like this one, and to watch that love ripple out into everyone, new partnership, and back into me was a blessing beyond measure. Nothing could have prepared me for what witnessing will do to the heart, break it and put it back together again. As fate would have it, I caught the bouquet.
May love find us, in whatever shape it wants.
I was engaged once and it ended just before March of 2020. Your chapter on Endings in Getting Back To Center truly helped sew me back together- I’ve carry it around in my consciousnesses ever since. Just totally bawling my eyes out at 7am while reading this letter. “Not in some way of being responsible for it, but in the way that when you love anyone it brings them closer to whatever they love next. What a blessing we keep finding people to love next and next and next.”
not me bawling my eyes out before 10am on a thursday. no one else writes about love like you, mar 💌