There are many photographs in my home. All of them are sweet memories. All of them of people and moments I hold close to my heart. But photographs of my wedding are not among them. I have a few framed but they are hidden away in a corner, as if I am ashamed to display them. I am. They give me no comfort and remind me of a day I would rather forget.
For the longest time, memories of my wedding day have been hazy. Somehow, I feel we started our life together all wrong.. despite our love surviving against all odds.
He had waited for me since he was 10. I finally fell in love with him at 15. Our ethnic backgrounds clashed for in other parts of the world, our cultures never meet. I fought my parents, lied, sneaked out back doors, was threatened, beaten and was even locked up to keep me away from him. I broke up with him just once wondering at the last minute if the first guy I had ever loved was enough of a sample to commit my entire life. I lasted a mere month without him, a month ending with me running back knowing for sure that I was going to hell if I followed my logical, complicated head rather than my loving, simple heart. That was the only time we were ever willingly apart, on my part anyway. He flew 8000 miles to make me change my mind and finally left because he loved me enough to let me go if that was what would make me happy. Happiness, I soon discovered while on my own, was a place forever in his heart.
We were sure we wanted a life together more than anything this world had to offer us, so we said our vows quietly soon after he proposed before a witness of two. But that was far away from my home and when I returned to my parent’s house, we had one last hurdle – to make our secret marriage a public one so that we could finally wake up next to each other every morning for the rest of our lives. My father finally agreed to our wedding, gaining respect for my love with every week he played another game of chess with him instead of taking me out, and we were ecstatic. After 8 years of clandestine meetings, measured conversations through paper and phone lines, of hearing my heart crack every time we had to go our own separate ways, we were a wedding day away. Enough waiting for someone else’s permission just to see his smile, so I could have one of my own. We had finally purchased our ticket to Happy Ever After.
But I never walked down the aisle to him like I had hoped I would. We exchanged our lifelong vows in a borrowed room with a borrowed minister with no evidence a wedding was taking place. I held no bouquet. I didn’t even have a special dress for the occasion. I had just pulled on whatever best I could find.
The only beautiful things I remember from that night were our love for each other, our handwritten vows and our wedding rings. Those and my lover’s tears as he spoke his promises to me should have been more than enough, but deep down there were unspoken hopes and hurts surrounding our wedding day that cast a shadow over us. Our love should have been strong enough to dispel that shadow, but instead, it was that we loved each other too much that we gave it a space in our lives. We tacitly denied the glitch in our love story, comforting each other with silver linings instead. And so that shadow became a thin barrier over time..so thin it wasn’t a tangible presence… yet a barrier nonetheless that filtered out the full spectrum of our happiness. Every wedding anniversary became a bittersweet day we both gingerly celebrated, a concerted effort to avoid that shadow.
But one fine day a decade later, I find myself finally at a place where I have enough strength to face that shadow and revisit our painful wedding memories. It is at my best friend’s wedding where my love and I spend a beautiful Saturday evening side-by-side with close friends, having the loveliest conversations. I wear a beautiful new dress I like and my lover, his favourite new clothes. We carry in our arms not a bouquet, but our sweet youngest daughter. And the world stands still when as the couple finish their vows, my lover gives me his own and we exchange our own kiss. We enjoy the beauty of everything around us celebrating true love – the moonlight, the flowers, the friendships, the photographs, the music, the food and the delightfully dressed guests. Gazing up at the full moon that night, I become aware that we have just enjoyed the garden wedding I had wished to have for our 10th wedding anniversary.
There I finally see the shadow for what it is - the regret that we did not make a better effort to have a special wedding worthy of our great romance. Yet hidden among my memories that have collected dust in the shadows lies a truth I have ignored along with my wedding photographs. We did in fact make a great effort for our wedding, but it was all directed at keeping the peace between our families long enough so that we could finally have what we truly wanted – not a mere wedding, but for the both of us to be together at last.. daily and freely. We desperately wanted to walk out in the open holding each other’s hand and be free to decide where to go and what time to call it a day. To have the simple freedom of unabashedly expressing our love for each other anytime, anywhere. All these years I have failed to see that unlike other couples, our marriage was not a uniting of two families but a barter to gain the basic freedom so many other couples take for granted.. the luxury of a shared meal, the joys of a simple heartfelt conversation.
Our wedding day was indeed a great moment in our love story, although it was not a reflection of our great romance. Instead, our wedding was a complicated and painful experience we avoid remembering because it was a reflection of the many barriers we faced as lovers. It is a day that is a stark reminder of the unsupportive relationships in our lives and the discomfort of two clashing cultures barely accommodating each other, begrudgingly admitting that love had conquered their differences. Our wedding was purely a social contract between two families, not a celebration of our love. Neither family really had any interest in a union they tried so hard to deny, and it follows that it could never have turned out a fitting day to celebrate it.
So I no longer feel regret attached to that day because as it turns out, there was no glitch in our love story after all. Far from caving in to the great pressure from our families to give up our own wedding day dreams, we gave in to their needs and demands because we had a far greater dream of life beyond our wedding. Our wedding day was not the weak link in our romance, it was a testimony of its strength.. as it was our final battleground. We may have come away with some casualties, but it is the day we won the war. We can look back now with pride over a battle well fought instead of with regret over the injuries we gained because after 10 years of marriage, we stand on soil that was well worth fighting for.
A decade of love that has grown stronger with time has given me the power to rewrite our history, and I am finally free of my runaway wedding and all its hovering shadows. After all these years, our wedding anniversary will finally be a day of great meaning, but one equal to many Independence Day celebrations all over the world as opposed to the romantic Valentine Day memories so many wedding anniversaries evoke. That’s okay though.. because it’s our hard won independence that keeps us cherishing the love we fought so hard to set free.
Still, our love story is missing a day to celebrate the great romance of our life. A day just for us.. to celebrate the very special love we share with each other that has seen the test of time and great trials. Perhaps a garden picnic or a cocktail party by a pool.. with flowers and pretty mementos. Definitely plenty of photographs taken of us both laughing into each other’s eyes and holding each other close. Captured moments in time of a very special day celebrating our life together.. tangible reflections of our great love story we will always be happy to remember and display along with our other cherished memories. But for now, I’ve added another photograph to our collection of favourites.
There are many photographs in my home. All of them are sweet memories. All of them of people and moments I hold close to my heart. Photographs of my wedding are now among them. I have taken them out of the dusty corner they were hidden in, because my love and I are proud to display them. They remind us now of a day we can never forget.. the day our love flew free.
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