Published
Every so often, fate unveils a secret. This type of occurrence is not unlike a comet’s plummeting toward earth: inconvenient and frightening yet miraculous and rare. You can’t unsee it and can’t go back. The biggest secret I’ve learned was bright and hot and stung like hell but left euphoria in its wake.
Two weeks after I was supposed to get married, I flew home to Texas. Two weeks after I was meant to become legally bound, my location on Find My changed. That alone was enough to alert my close circle that after two rounds of postponement, the wedding was off. I only thinly escaped the song and dance—the veil, the dress, the aisle, the alternate reality. The world stopped and so did my weary ride toward bridaldom. Not all engagements come with oppressive undertones and a bone-deep feeling that something is not right, but this one did.
My fourteen months of being enfianced were dark and disorienting, and the traditional, corn-fed fairytales of my youth didn’t help. The important part of this story, however, is that matrimony did not ensue. In its place emerged something more holy and pure—a turn of events that momentarily brought me back to the soil on which I was raised. It left me unwed, and thus, free.
The thing about weddings is that they usually happen anyway. In sickness and in health, in good faith and in all-consuming trepidation. Getting on board for a ceremony while uneasy about a marriage was far easier than I care to admit. Acquiescing with hope and flattery and a whole lot of naivete toward nuptials can be as simple as moving with inertia. The velocity at which time can move toward marriage doesn’t need a physics equation. It’s supersonic even when it’s wrong. It’s breakneck even when it’s broken. That’s when you need a comet—a life-altering, inexplicable, once-in-a-century series of events, and maybe also an internal awakening—to save you. Not that you need saving, but you know what I mean.
The secret I learned that spring revealed the precariousness of a young woman’s life; one who was unready and unsure, and in hindsight, still a girl. Sometimes I think that my brush with an almost-but-never-should-have-been marriage was sent, wrapped in fire and ice like the celestial tempest that it was, by ancestors who had already lived this tale and wanted me to know it, too. I wonder if ghosts of wifehoods past wanted to tell me something. It’s a harrowing lesson. It reveals that as a woman in the world, if you don’t decide your needs, they will be decided for you. That without a value system, you can be convinced of anything. That you can get engaged before you’re ready, married before you’ve settled on a world-view. That there is a series of misleading narratives and patriarchal pressures that can, if misunderstood, whisk you away. Without proper time to grow, to confront yourself, to decide what you think, these are the winds that can carry a girl, unequipped yet all dressed for the occasion, down an aisle.
On the other side, I realized what I had nearly missed. What almost passed me by. Bright and hot, stinging and euphoric. A sense of sweat-inducing relief sets in every time I think of what could have been. I’m honestly unsure if I could have escaped on my own. It’s hard to confront what you don’t want to see; it’s painful to break away from a familiar darkness.
A comet—an unexpected, blazing realization—can burn your eyes. Staring at its light, which illuminated for me the shortcomings of a societal norm and gendered expectations and going along with it all, is uncomfortable to say the least. But the only other option is forever residing in the dark. There you are, blithely betrothed and blissfully unaware of the truth. The one about you and how good it could be. How perfect you are without all of this. How warm the light is. How big you will grow when you finally see through it all and get a glance of yourself, surviving just fine, even in the eye of an unearthly storm.
