Pearls- July 25th.

by Lori Dwyer on July 25, 2012 · 14 comments

Today should be my third wedding anniversary.

I started to write something florid and beautiful… then I stopped, because it just hurts too much.

I might finish it, one day soon. Or maybe not.

I spend Monday angry, pissed off like I was last year. Tuesday I am a block of… something. I would say ice, but I don’t have the edgy to feel that cold. Concrete is far too stable, too dense; where I am floating, pinned to the world by the thin ribbon of my children, only barely holding on.

If there such a thing as a nothing that can exist within a person, right now I am it. No boiling emotions… do emotions exist if there is no one to take weight of them, one way or another? For the people within my life, my emotions are singular and separate, in that there is nothing anyone can do that will alter them. There are no words that can penetrate this, make sense of this… give me cliches and karma and things happening for a reason and I will stare at you as though you are a vapid mist, a fog.

With nothing that can be said or done to give me peace, to balm my pain, I am given a certain space. There is nothing to be said, no way to view this except “She will be OK”…

And I always am. I am an untouchable… I am bizarrely, horribly unique.

***

It was superstition, my gran (who is, against all odds, not only powering on but back home) tells me, when she was married in the late 1940′s, that a bride wearing pearls brought only bad luck to a marriage. My gran’s wedding dress, made by her mother, was covered in them, and you can just barely pick them out in the black and white wedding photos she still has on her dressing table.

“Why?” I ask, fascinated by rituals and traditions such as this, “what was wrong with pearls?”

“Pearls are tears, they say. Nonsense. I was covered in them and your grandfather and I had thirty happy years together.“

“What happened to me, then…? Not a pearl in sight, and look at what I’m left with.”

There isn’t much to say to that.

***

“The calendar…” says a friend, “the date. If only you didn’t have to pay attention to it, know what it was…”

I’m inclined to agree, then I wonder about it, more and more as the days before my wedding anniversary melt into one another. I think I’d know, even without a calendar, even without the human encumbrance of time. I think this time of year, these few days late in winter, would be a time of mourning anyway. A time of sadness.

And I do mourn. I don’t let myself think about him enough in detail to ache down to the very marrow of my bones, to miss him in a way that hooks my soul and distends it upward, causing agony I never knew possible in the Before.

My eyes are dry. But I am quiet and silent and unsmiling. I sleep a lot. I wear dark clothes, because I can. Dark eyeliner and little color on my face.

And I wear pearls. Pearls at my earlobes. And two strands of them, wrapped around my wrists. One for each year of tears.