W.We officially have a week-long countdown to our twice postponed wedding anniversary, and I’m experiencing a mixture of emotions. “Are you excited?” is the standard question people ask of brides and grooms at this point, and my answer to that is yes and no. That celebration has been postponed for so long now and feels so far from where we were mentally at in 2019 when we planned it that it is difficult to re-enter that headspace and access the excitement. It’s much easier to fall back on those standard 2020 emotions of fear, pessimism, and the vague sense of impending doom.
My worries are less “will the cake look good?” or “Will the bridesmaids wear the right shoes with their dresses?” and much more, “Is this going to be a super spreader event?” and “Will my family get enough gas in their cars to get to the venue after the panic buying?” The whole thing is very reduced, many people cannot come because they are stuck in other countries or their circumstances have changed. There will be fewer people in a room than most of them experience in a pub or restaurant these days. But the fear remains, because everything in the world has changed since we stopped in front of a small barn two and a half years ago and decided that it would be nice to have our aperitif on hay bales.
In the summer of 2020, a viral tweet went viral in New York City that said, “I wish I could have known around this time last year that in 12 months I would reach out to my wife and say, ‘We may have to eat. ‘ the can rations tonight because I didn’t get the N95 masks in time to go to the supermarket before curfew. ‘”Every time I feel bad about our location, I think back to it. Things were so much worse a year ago when E and I were hiding in a one-room apartment discussing how we should get our bodies back to our families in the UK in case we should die. Sitting at a kitchen table twelve months later and talking about whether the color of the confetti is exactly what we wanted feels both wonderful and absurd.
