Almost a Bride

by Jo Watson

  I love you. Forever.

  He didn’t need to say much else. T-Squared were also gone—no note, though. I doubted that I’d ever hear from them again. I still had a few days of my vacation left, and I intended to make the most of them even though my heart was snapping into a million pieces.

  Jane, Lilly, and I all drank a lot of tropical cocktails and lamented my sorrows, and my friends were both so patient. Although, Lilly did owe me after I’d endured hours of similar heartbroken laments when she broke up with Damien.

  “What’s with us going to tropical places, meeting men who break our hearts, and then crying over them? I asked. “Are we cursed? Is this the curse of our group?”

  “Mine did end happily,” Lilly offered, dangling her ring in front of us again. In the sunlight, waving it around like that, the ring had the potential to blind people.

  “That’s because he didn’t betray you and stab you through the heart with a giant dagger.”

  “True,” Lilly said.

  “You’re next, Jane.” I raised my glass to her. “It’s your turn to have a mental breakdown and then fly off to some exotic location and fall in love with a man that breaks your heart into a million little pieces.”

  We all paused for a moment before bursting into laughter. Hell would freeze over before any of us saw Jane rush off and do something so crazy.

  “A man”—Lilly held up her hand—“that sweeps you off those big feet of yours and finally makes you do something spontaneous for a change.”

  “I am spontaneous,” Jane said.

  “Name one spontaneous thing you’ve ever done in your entire life.” Lilly pulled her sunglasses down and gave her a challenging look.

  “That is so rich coming from you, Lilly,” Jane shot back.

  “Hey, I’m spontaneous now.” Lilly took a long loud slurp of her cocktail. “I have sex in airplane bathrooms, don’t you know!”

  We all burst out laughing again. It was hard to imagine the Lilly of a few years ago joining the mile-high club. Accidentally locking herself in the bathroom or getting her foot stuck in it, maybe, but bumping and grinding in the bathroom…

  “I’ll never be able to join the mile-high club.” Jane almost sounded disappointed. “I’m too tall. I wouldn’t fit.”

  We laughed some more and people started to look.

  “God, we’re getting a bit drunk, aren’t we.” Lilly slurped down the last bit of her cocktail.

  “Not drunk enough.” I waved down a waiter and ordered another three.

  “Not for me.” Lilly stood up with a smile. “I have somewhere I need to be.”

  “You two need pills,” Jane shouted after her as she walked away. “Pills that make you stop. It’s not natural.”

  Jane and I found ourselves alone again. It was strange, I’d always felt closer to Lilly than anyone else, but this whole thing had really made me appreciate Jane and her excessive level-headedness. It had been exactly what I’d needed this past year. And it was exactly what I needed now.

  “But seriously, are you okay?” she asked calmly.

  “No. But I will be…someday.” That word held so much weight, because I had never felt like this before. It had felt like there was never going to be any end to it all, but now I knew that there would be. There had to be. I couldn’t keep living like this. I was not living at all.

  Jane leaned over and rested a hand on my arm. “Well, you know I’m here for you.”

  “I know. Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome to stay with me for a while if you need to.”

  “Nooo, thanks. Not with your mother around.”

  Jane rolled her eyes. She always tried to make light of it, but we all knew how much her strained relationship with her adoptive mother hurt her. Jane always felt inadequate; her mother’s excessive “helpfulness” was nothing more than criticism in her eyes. And she always felt like she was trying to live up to something she could never attain.

  “She packed you a gift, by the way.”

  “What?”

  “It’s bad. Really bad. She got me one, too.”

  “What could be worse than the time she cut me out the article ‘Kale Is King: How to Lose Ten Pounds in Ten Days’?”

  Jane laughed. “I actually made one of those smoothies.”

  “And?”

  She scrunched her face up. “Cut grass meets cardboard.”

  I cringed. “So what’s the gift?”

  “I swear, my mother is actually going to cause me to die of embarrassment one day…” Jane dug in her handbag, pulled out a T-shirt, and unfolded it.

  KEEP CALM AND BE MY BOYFRIEND

  “Subtle. I wonder what she’s trying to say?” I said sarcastically.

  “You know, the more she tries to force a boyfriend on me, the more I don’t want one.”

  Our cocktails arrived and I held mine up in the air. “To being single.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  It’s strange how when you finally open yourself up to things, they come. Last year I’d shut down, run away, drawn the blinds, and hidden. I’d spent my days sewing hems and dreaming of sewing Trevv’s penis to the wall. I’d sat eating ice cream, stalking him and Tess on Facebook, and had been paralyzed with fear, insecurity, and embarrassment.

  But the second I opened myself up—the second I decided to try to turn my life around and rebuild, a series of fortuitous events happened. Small at first, insignificant really, and then momentum started to build.

  The first event happened only a few hours after leaving Mauritius in the duty-free shopping area of O.R. Tambo International Airport in South Africa. I had felt sick the entire flight, because I knew that with each minute that passed, the gap between Chris and me was getting bigger and bigger. I’d been devastated to leave Mauritius; it felt like I was cutting the final tie I had to Chris.

  When we finally arrived in Johannesburg, I immediately started looking for some tax-free chocolate to take the edge off the painful Chris sorrow, when I walked into a clothing shop. I was lured by the shiny things in the window. I sauntered inside and stared enviously at a gorgeous pair of earrings that I could ill afford, when I was tapped on the shoulder.

  “Nice bag.” I turned and came face-to-face with a stylish woman with a big retro Afro.

  “Where did you get it?” she asked.

  “Oh, this?” I pointed at my crazy, colorful, bedazzled bag. “It’s just something I made.” I was trying hard to swallow, but the chocolate contained peanut butter and was sticking to the roof of my mouth.

  “Really.” She looked it up and down. “I think tourists would love it, it has such a unique African flavor to it. It’s like Indian meets Zulu meets Cape Malay…”

  I nodded. I certainly wasn’t going to admit it out loud, but that wasn’t the intention at all. In fact, the only reason it looked like that was because I’d made it out of all the off-cuts and discarded items I could find at Patel’s.

  “You know, it really does merge cultures so well, and captures our unique diversity as South Africans.” She put her hand on her hip, and her fabulous, chunky wooden bangles clanked together.

  I decided to play along. Why not? “Mmmm, that’s what I was going for. I really wanted to give it a ‘rainbow nation’ feel.” Bullshit!!!

  But the lady nodded. She lapped it up. She smiled with her full lip-glossed lips and asked to look at it. She inspected the thing as if it were something foreign and exotic. “You know, I can really see that. The cultural binaries created in the layout of the fabric.”

  “Mmmm, I really thought hard about positioning. One needed to accentuate the other.” Bigger bullshit!

  “You know”—she said You know a lot—“I’d really like to try and sell a few here. I can’t promise anything extraordinary, but maybe we can start with five, see how it goes.”

  “Seriously?” I asked her, feeling totally shocked. I couldn’t quite believe I was hearing those words coming from someone’s mouth. Let alone someone as fashionably fabulous as
she was. I needed to hear them again, just so I knew it was real. And it wasn’t some psychosis brought on by Chris withdrawal. “Really?”

  “Absolutely! I would love to.” She extended her hand for me to shake. I took it happily.

  “I’m Zolani, by the way.”

  “Annie.”

  I went home that day feeling just a little bit better. I had the tiniest spring in my step. The tiniest glimmer of happy hope, but then…

  I walked into my house. I stopped. I stood. I stared.

  It was disgusting. There were still boxes that hadn’t been unpacked from almost a year ago. No shelves had been hung, so books and DVDs were piled up in the corners of the room, gathering spiderwebs and dead insects. The shower was unused and currently acting as a storage facility. And it just all looked so damn depressing.

  When I was with Trevv, I’d taken great pride in my surroundings; everything was neat and clean and beautifully decorated. It was time to pull my pretties out of their dusty boxes and start turning this place into something vaguely decent. Sure, there was nothing I could do about the half-naked man outside just yet, but at least I could counterbalance the hideous view outside with something pretty on the inside.

  But starting was extremely overwhelming. Staring into the face of a year’s worth of clutter and disorganization, I didn’t know where to start, so I began with the DVDs that were strewn across the floor at my feet.

  But then I saw it…Bradley Cooper stared back at me from one of the DVDs. And when I saw those deep, dreamy blue eyes, I started crying. I was wailing, in fact, and threw myself down on the couch, clutching the DVD. The familiar misery spot.

  “Fuck. No, Annie!” I suspect I shouted that too loudly, because I heard the next-door neighbor’s dog bark in response. I pulled the DVD out of its case and tried to snap it in half dramatically…Do you know those things are bloody unbreakable? I threw myself back down on the couch and then shot off it again.

  No! No, I had already spent a whole year on that couch crying, and I was not going to repeat it. So I tried to pull myself together—still wailing—and continued to unpack boxes. I cried the whole time: It was almost comical. I wailed as I threw out the old things that I no longer needed. I sobbed as I started pulling out some pictures that I wanted to hang on the walls, and I moaned painfully as I went about trying to put up a shelf.

  But at least I was doing something constructive—not wallowing on that couch. I swung around and glared at the thing. It was a beige three-seater. Big, comfortable, and perfect for lying on and crying.

  I leapt at it with fury; I was going to get rid of it immediately. Sell it and buy myself a chair, one that I couldn’t lie down on. I would sit upright, come hell or high water!

  But it proved very challenging pulling the thing out of my living room. It weighed a ton, and by the time I’d managed to drag it onto my tiny patio, I was finished. Drenched in sweat and out of breath.

  I stumbled into my bedroom, peeled off my clothes, and climbed into bed. And then I noticed the ring on my finger. I looked at it for a second and allowed myself to think back to the moment when Chris had slipped it on. How real it had all felt and how amazing he’d looked in the setting sun. Our fake wedding had been beautiful, one of the best days of my life.

  I took it off slowly and looked at it one last time before I opened my drawer and slipped it in.

  Maybe I would keep it safe. Just in case.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  The next day I didn’t wake with as much enthusiasm as I’d had the night before.

  I guess these things work in waves. I wasn’t going to feel better overnight; this would be a process, and it was just beginning. In fact, that morning it felt almost impossible to get out of bed and drag myself to work. My legs felt at least ten times heavier than they really were.

  I missed Chris like I’d never missed Trevv, and it physically hurt not being with him. But I got up and showered—and cried a little in the shower, it was incredibly dramatic—and then made myself some breakfast. I cried while eating that, too, equally dramatic, especially when I choked on a flake of cereal.

  I got ready for work, yes, cried again. I even had to apply my mascara twice. The first time it washed away with tears before it had time to set; the second time, I had to bite my lip in order to stop the tears from coming, while frantically fanning them with a magazine to get it to dry quicker. I tried to lift my spirits by reminding myself about the five bags that I needed to make, and decided to talk to the Patels about them that day.

  They were thrilled to see me and wanted to know everything about my vacation. So I told them about swimming with the tropical fish (not about how Chris had taken a photo of my bum and pretended it was a mistake), I told them about seeing dolphins (not about the dolphin squeak-off Chris and I had had), and I told them about how beautiful the beaches looked at night (not about the walk we’d taken on our first night together and how I’d flirted with him). I also told them about the bags. And they were thrilled.

  In fact, they said that I could use—within reason—fabrics and other stuff I needed. But that first day back at work was hard; the hours seemed to drag on and on and on, and getting through them felt like pulling teeth from a dead sloth. I sighed a lot. It was all I could do to keep pushing down that lump in my chest that seemed to be forming every time I allowed my mind to wander to Chris.

  It took all my energy not to think about him. I was exhausted from physically trying to chase the thought from my mind. But five o’clock finally came around and I left with a small bundle of fabrics, buttons, ribbons, and other bits and bobs that I’d been allowed to commandeer. And although funds were still desperately tight, I decided I needed to find something more substantial and healthy to eat, other than the packets of nutrient-deficient noodles I’d been eating for the last year. The equivalent of chewing on cardboard covered in MSG and dust.

  So even though I didn’t feel like it, I dragged myself to the grocery store and walked out with a bag of veggies and whole-wheat bread. I would make a big pot of vegetable soup—it’s all I could afford—and eat that for several dinners to come. At least I would be getting some vitamins and minerals. Who knows, maybe they would contribute to my mental well-being, and perhaps help me lose the few extra pounds that Tess had so happily pointed out.

  That night after eating my homemade veggie soup, which was actually pretty tasty, and before sitting down to make some bags, I dragged that stupid exercise stepper out that I’d been conned into buying. The man on the late-night TV show with the very obvious hairpiece and orange fake-tanned face had been pretty convincing. He’d promised me twenty pounds in six weeks and a million inches off my hips (terms and conditions apply).

  So I dusted the little sucker off and stepped for about five minutes, vowing I would build up to something that could at least vaguely count as physical activity.

  Then I sat down at my sewing machine and started thinking. The other bags I’d made in the heat of hatred for Sonja (evil boss bitch from hell) and I had purposefully made them as over-the-top as possible in a rebellious proclamation of passive-aggressive defiance. This time, I was going to make them in a more considered manner. I knew I could make them better with a little extra thought, care, and planning. They would still maintain that frantic colorful feel, but I could bring a little more skill to them. So I started.

  I cut all the bits of colored fabric up into different sizes and shapes, and put them together like a multicolored jigsaw puzzle. It looked like a mad patchwork quilt, in a good way. Then something caught my eye; in the corner of the room was an old canvas shopping bag, the kind you toss away or use to store crap in, as I was currently doing. I took it to my sewing station and started arranging the patchwork material on it. I smiled happily to myself as I watched new life being breathed into something that was once discarded, long forgotten, and considered ugly.

  I sewed so late into the night that I fell asleep slumped over my sewing machine; I only realized this when my p
hone beeped with a message.

  I looked down at it: six a.m. on a Wednesday. Who the hell was messaging me at this time? It was from an anonymous number, and it took me a few seconds to figure out what the message even meant.

  Hey Annie-Anne! A new day is here, so throw on a dress and get your butt into gear.

  “Huh?” I read it again. It sounded vaguely familiar. Was it some automated message from a telemarketing place, or some sales pitch from a travel agent telling me I’d won a cruise? But I didn’t think so.

  And then I got it. The realization skyrocketed my blood pressure and made my heart pound. They were similar to lines from the Dr. Seuss book, Oh, the Places You’ll Go! Chris’s favorite. I read the words over and over again. Each time my smile grew bigger and a little spark in me felt like it was getting ignited.

  Hang on…Wednesday was my hump day. And Chris had remembered that. As much as I loved that he was thinking about me, I had to be wary of that little spark. It could not ignite. Could not. And so, with a sad smile, I put my phone down and didn’t acknowledge Chris’s text.

  It took me precisely seven days to finish the five bags. For one of them I’d used another discarded shopping bag that I’d found, and I even used an old coffee bag to make one of the others. And they had turned out better that I could have ever imagined. And the morning I was excitedly packing them up to take to Zolani, my phone beeped once again. It was a message from the same anonymous number at the exact same time. I opened it and my heart quickened once more.

  You’ve got talent and brains and sexiness too. And even your bitch ex-boss knows that to be true.

  The words of encouragement that Chris was sending me all the way from the other end of the world made me want to scream with joy while simultaneously breaking down crying. They were a strange, bittersweet mix. As long as I was still on this journey of mine, I couldn’t be with Chris. Not now…maybe not ever.