ya don’t treat the root cause it can pop up at the worst possible time.”
~ Barbara-Jean Nelson
It was the weekend. The sun was shining brightly, the birds were chirping, and there was a church parking lot full of pickup trucks and a few tractors. In Wishing Well that meant it was either Sunday service or a wedding. Unfortunately, today it was a wedding.
Weddings and I had a love-hate relationship, in that I hated them, and people seemed to love inviting me to them, or worse asking me to be in them. Thankfully, this morning I was only an attendee, a reluctant one, but one nonetheless.
I scratched the back of my neck as I pulled into the lot. People thought I was being hyperbolic when I said that I was allergic to weddings, but I wasn’t. Over the past three years, I’d developed an actual condition. Whenever I had to witness two people vow their eternal, undying love for one another I broke out in hives. Actual hives.
I’d gone most of my adult life without having to attend, much less participate in the antiquated ritual, but lately, it seemed like that was all I was doing. In the past few years, my siblings and friends had all been tying the knot at an alarming rate. It felt like there was a wedding every other month.
And instead of building up a tolerance to the “I dos”, it seemed my symptoms worsened with each walk down the aisle I witnessed.
Taking a deep breath, I pulled my Chevy Silverado Z71 into a space between my brother Cooper’s Ford F-150 and my brother Sawyer’s Dodge Ram 3500. It wasn’t uncommon for the Briggs family to take up two, even three rows in front of the church. My parents procreated a total of nine times, which produced eight boys and one girl. I had three older brothers, four younger brothers and then there was the baby of the family, my little sister Harmony.
Out of the nine of us, half were married, and a few were engaged. There were only two holdouts left, my brother Wyatt, who was the brains of the Briggs boys. He’d attended MIT and worked for the government. He was the smart one, so it didn’t surprise me that we were the two left standing. The two sane siblings, if you will.
I’d never talked to Wyatt about his reluctance to put a ring on it with any of his girlfriends. To my knowledge, he’d never had a messy breakup or even had his heart broken. Unlike me. My aversion to weddings was somewhat of a legend around town. Everyone knew why I wasn’t a fan of matrimony.
The night before my wedding, I came home from a gig I’d had and caught my fiancée in bed with my best man. That was ten years ago, but time had not lessened the bitter taste in my mouth for the entire institution.
Before heading inside I turned to open my glove box. When I did I noticed my guitar case behind my seat. It had dust on the top because I hadn’t moved it since the night before my wedding ten years ago. I’d had two number one singles, and my album was voted the most anticipated of the year, but after my life imploded, I couldn’t bring myself to play. So my guitar had sat in the same spot I’d put it when I’d driven home from my last gig.
Shaking off the feeling of loss I got every time I was reminded of my music, I reached down, popped open the glove compartment, and grabbed my emergency mouthwash and cologne. After a quick swoosh of peppermint goodness, I opened the door and spit it on the ground. A few spritzes of Calvin Klein’s Eternity for men and I was good to go.
My hygiene was not from any desire to hook up at the wedding. This was not a “why take sand to the beach” situation. If anything, it was the opposite. The last thing I wanted to do was go home with someone tonight. I’d observed a trend that sometimes women who were amped up after witnessing two people pledge their undying love for one another tended to project those feelings on whoever showed them even an ounce of attention.
I liked no strings. No commitment. No heartbreak sort of arrangements. Following those guidelines had kept me from feeling like I’d been kicked in the balls by the Terminator, which is exactly what it had felt like