Saturday, November 29, 2008

the rehearsal

I knew that this was the story I'd tell at our impossible wedding. That my favorite movie was playing, and you watched it, smiling, and I watched you, equally and irrationally gleeful. That "forever" popped into my head, and I didn't swat it away. That, for the first time, I was content with the idea of love the way that everyone else talked about it. That it seemed so enduring.

And of course I wouldn't address how less than an hour later, I was rolling my eyes and shaking my head and trying to separate the futile from the hopeful. I would not speak of how fresh faces pervaded my vision like pennies gorging a wishing well, how the hypotheticals glistened in the sunlight.

And i'd never speak of how some sideways comment from a roadside bomber made me doubt the sincerity of everything. How I questioned my capacity to love and if it was my job to stop until i knew every connotation and consequence.

No, instead, I'd put on my finest virgin white and my coyest smile and take faith in some new beginning. I would shed the scales from other fingers and burn each tawdry bit of fiction; i would stop substituting in random personalities for variables, and i would love with every fervent good intention.

Because sometimes self-deception is the only way to discover the selfless truth:

love has no definition
love has only its reality

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