Through the veil she was almost as pretty as I'd wished she would have been the first time we met for real, in real life, in person on the street. The love of my life.
I remembered that in certain photographs she had this quality, like an angel or maybe just someone who thought they were one, so strung out they could touch the sky. She wasn't that pretty, no pixie dust queen, just another girl who liked to make faces. But I think I love her.
You hope that, and I hoped that, the love of my life--because that's what she is, she's perfect for me--would be rich and beautiful and well-adjusted and come to you with open arms and an open heart and no baggage or maybe just a tiny bit. Just a little bit.
Well she had a little bit of baggage and then another twelve carts of the shit hiding behind it. One estranged parent became a string of foster homes that had each taken their turn with a hammer and a chisel and a blindfold, carving the person she is today with all the foresight that blindness and drunkenness affords.
Here in her wedding dress, the one we'll never get married in, her chest is heaving and she's spinning, breathless, holding her skirt down so that the furry woodland creatures don't get the wrong idea. She's asking me to join her, to be with her, and I want to. I told you, she's the love of my life.
I'm just worried that she's the love of a very short life, unfulfilled, pointless.
Maybe I can be the love of someone else's.