As Beautiful As We Were: Re-post ... Seven Years Later

I first posted a version of this in 2007, while on our honeymoon. Now, on our seventh wedding anniversary, it's still true. Sometimes, even with sleepless, child-raising nights, and the constant wear and tear of Life, we're still that beautiful. So, since seven is a heavenly number, I'll leak this out again. For you, Esti, because you're still wonderful enough to make me cry.

***

‘Do you think you’ll cry?’ Corrie asks me. I am leaving for Pakistan in two days. To get married.

Corrie is my good friend. We are both – at the moment – still single, and we’ve often talked about our various relationships and the ways our hearts have been tried and broken and educated in love – or what we thought was love. Maybe sometimes it was. This time, for me, it is. I feel a bit guilty for being the one to go into that mystical golden city, Marriage, while she must stay, waiting another year at the gate. God knows I have watched others do the same, leaving me behind to feel in my heart a kind of obligatory happiness mixed with lonely despair. Anyway, this kind of thing is exhausting to keep talking about, so we switch to my upcoming wedding and she asks her question. Will I cry when Celestina comes to me as a bride?

I think for a minute, take a sip of my latte, now slightly cooled by the late spring wind. A few big drops fall from the apocalyptic sky but the wind is too furious and before they can really rain on us the blackened clouds are blasted along like smoke. The evening sun lances sudden, long spears of pure light through the boiling sky to prick the earth golden where they touch.

‘No,’ I say. ‘I don’t really cry.’ We walk home, talking of other things. When the day comes, I fly to Pakistan, where my words will be proved wrong.

***

I have departed the country many times, usually to the sight of my dad’s face as his heart fills with words he wants to say and my mom’s eyes tearing up. This is the first time they have ever come with me.

There is a moment of confusion at the check-in counter because I have told them they can have two carry-on bags and now the British Airways people are telling them in bland, repetitious voices that they can only have one. There is some frantic on-the-floor shuffling of parcels and shifting of things into my aunt’s and uncle’s cases under the expressionless stare of the BA staff until the baggage composition computes properly to their programmed minds and they let us through.

We collect, the lot of us, my aunt and uncle, my parents, me and my brother Kevin and his girlfriend, Holly, around the Bill Reid sculpture in the departures lobby at Vancouver international. Kevin and Holly are not coming with us, they are only here to see us off. I like the way my brother does things like that. The first time I left for Afghanistan he called me on my way to the airport and wished me well and said he was proud of me. There are some things that do make me cry, and my brother saying things like that is one of them. My younger brother, Jeremy, and Krista and their kids aren’t coming either. Pakistan is a difficult place for people to get away to, even for a wedding. So this is all of my party, nearly. We will be joined by my cousin Deb and her boyfriend Danny in London at Heathrow and finally my friend Mark will join us in Islamabad a day after we arrive there. This is it, all I’m bringing with me of my world as I go to make my vows and change my life forever.

This is not how I imagined it. My mind had idly daydreamed – assumed, really - a party in mid-autumn with my well-loved friends all around. I imagined marrying in my circle, and the sun going down in russet flame and the dry leaves shivering and all of us laughing until dawn, the wine bottles slowly emptying, the fire burning low, the voices fading into that companionable silence so rarely achieved.

Throughout my life, I have had two conflicting daydreams. One has been like an ad for Abercrombie and Fitch, friends sitting around the fire or lying in the grass, the background in soft focus, all of us wearing our well-designed sweaters and our comfortably crumpled jeans. A guitar, an old picnic basket, wine, wind, beauty, laughter. A perfect moment, captured forever. I used to say my life’s pursuit was the perfect sweater, which was my slightly loopy way of saying I wanted that moment where the perfect sweater fit perfectly. I’ve since found the sweater, but the moment did not come with it, and that is exactly the problem with that daydream: It is smoke on the wind, the stuff of ad campaigns, which tune into our longings and do nothing to meet them, only promise, promise, promise until we’ve forgotten what we truly long for. And from this dubious source came the picture of my wedding as I thought it would be. There may be nothing wrong with this. More probably, it is the siren’s song that lures people to their deaths. A life spent in the pursuit of a perfect moment is worthless in the end, leading only to a torpid soul, the emptiness behind the paper-thin world of Abercrombie and Fitch.

But I had another daydream, one that filled my soul to bursting, one so wild that I am only now beginning to believe it might be true. It came from a lot of places, but mostly the best kind of books. I could feel it when Jess Aarons crosses the bridge to Terebithia after Leslie dies, when Jill Pole fits arrow to string, preparing to die in The Last Battle, when Gandalf rides over the ridge to the aid of his friends in Helm’s Deep, when Dumbledore tells Harry that his mother’s love was more powerful than any magic. It is more of a feeling than a daydream, really, a kind of hugeness inside, sad and beautiful, glory catching in your throat. Tolkien was on its trail when he described the eucatastrophe – the sudden turn for the Good. C.S. Lewis called it Joy and said it made you feel like dancing – or fighting. I have a friend who calls it Resurrection Power, and having tasted it once, he is forever haunted by it. I have called it different things, most often ‘The Big Beautiful Thing’, and sometimes, ‘Heaven’. For awhile I thought it might have been getting married, but I knew even before I was married myself that it was not. Maybe the moment of falling in love is like it so much, we’ve let ourselves believe that marriage is heaven. As St. Paul said, there is a mystery in marriage that is like heaven, and St. John describes heaven as though it is a wedding, with the bride coming in white. Maybe in the end it is like that, but for now I know that marriage is more like sharpening your sword on a rock than it is like seeing shooting stars every night. Love, if it is worth anything, will make you bleed. Love fights.

I guess it was this daydream, this hugeness of feeling that drove me out of my door, clear off to Afghanistan four years ago. There were other things, of course, more immediate symptoms of longing – relationships that hadn’t worked, friends that had scattered and moved along, my own failure to become a man in any way I could believe in. I kept telling myself that I would come back, that after I went off and did whatever it was that I had to do, I’d come back and by then the campfire and that perfect autumn day would be waiting, and all of us with our perfect jeans and our perfect sweaters … and the girl I’d always thought I’d marry (whoever she was) would be there beside me, laughing prettily over her glass of merlot. But always, underneath, the other daydream gave this picture the lie. My favourite words from the Old Testament, spoken by Daniel’s three friends to the raging king of Babylon: ‘The God we believe in is able to save us from your fire, O King, but we want you to know, that even if he does not, we will not bow to your statue’ – These words spoke of something I wanted, something that made the first daydream seem like a cheap trinket, the thing of a moment, worth nothing. My friend who is haunted by the Resurrection wants sometimes to be able to call fire from heaven; I just want to be able to stand up and say, ‘but even if he does not …’ to the bullies of the world. I am nowhere near having done it. But in my stumbling way I did find a stone to sharpen my sword on. I met her in Pakistan and there wasn’t a campfire or a perfect sweater in sight.

I’m not going to tell you everything. I’m only going to tell you about one moment. In Pakistan there is a ceremony called the Mehndi, usually held the night before the wedding day. Historically, the groom was not allowed to a girl’s Mehndi – it was her preparation to meet her husband. She was washed and perfumed and her hair was oiled and combed. She was arrayed in all her beauty. Then she was brought to her husband, in the style of a princess come to meet a king. These days, usually, the groom is present at the Mehndi, but his bride is still brought to him in the same way. I came in first, with a red and gold shawl held like a canopy over my head as I walked. Girls in bright dresses threw flower petals. I was led to stage and a seat and garlanded with flowers.

Then she came.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to describe it properly. She came walking, under the same red and gold shawl, held up by her attendants, sisters and cousins and friends with rivers of shining black hair and dressed in the brightest of colours, violet and scarlet and saffron and emerald, with gold jangling on their wrists. They adorned her, but she walked in the middle of them all, set apart, dressed in bright pink and pistachio green, shot through with silver. The light fell on her and time seemed to hold its breath. The flower petals hung in the air and all besides her faded, even her maidens were like dimming fairy shapes on the edges of her glory. I know this is the kind of thing you are supposed to say. I know this is what they try to make you believe in the soft-focus moments of Hollywood romances and Hallmark cards. But I am telling you that it is also real, sometimes. It was spring in Narnia, and the white tree of Gondor flowering, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

They say that marriage is a sacrament, a place where God touches the earth and a little of heaven slips through. Maybe there are more of these places than we know, maybe we kill them with disbelief. But I know for sure that when Celestina came to me like a princess in a story that it was in one of those places where the veil between what is now and what is to come was lifted a little and I saw and I believed. The next day I made my vow with my mouth, but that moment was my heart’s vow, and while I made it, I cried.

While I write this we are in England, in a borrowed apartment overlooking a diamond-studded sea. She is standing in a white dress on the veranda with her face upturned to the sun and the wind moving lovingly around her. We both know that this is both truth and illusion, because I know, I know. This is what they all want: a fairytale. Love and rockets, a wedding, a happily-ever-after. But I know what it was. The veil may have lifted for a second, I may have caught a glimpse of the Big Beautiful Thing, but it was only a second, and we live on this side of the veil, still, seeing through a glass, darkly, and love must still fight while it draws breath. Each day I get up and bow my head before the one with whom I have joined and allow the friction of our rubbing souls to scrape mine clean as a beach stone, smoothed by the waves and the tumble. One day we may actually be as beautiful as we were that day – and stay that way. So in that hope, we live.