Rehosting "Getting #metoo’d at my mother’s wedding"
You don’t get what you don’t ask for
originally posted Jun 10, 2019
I rationalised going, as celebrating my mother not dying from cancer. That’s something I could honestly do. I'm pretty stoked about that. But as I hear the first speech, it becomes clear that this was in fact the case, I find myself getting offended on behalf of the marriage I didn't want to recognize as legitimate.
The groom holds a speech about how grateful he is to have her in his life. He’s uncomfortable speaking in front of an audience about something so private. He doesn't like to be the centre of attention.
The bride holds a speech about not dying from cancer. A celebration of life and love, but more in general terms. She doesn't like to make it all about them, either. She reminds us all to savour the moment, and enjoy the small things in life; to not take them for granted. Like good food and good friends, and sharing each others lives. To live in the present, and not worry so much about the bills and all the other small stuff, that we all usually spend our time worrying about.
I remember the name of my male cousin, avoiding social catastrophe. I barely recognize my female cousin, and I have to take a gamble when asked who she was in the crowd. I was right, just like I always am about everything, but it was a close call.
One of my mom's oldest friends, who has given me a sense of being a little too friendly ever since I was 16, held her hands on me for a little too long and told me I was handsome. Her husband couldn't come. I was never attracted to her, only to the extent that you are to people you can tell are attracted to you. The “well, if I don’t have to pay for it” attraction. She’d gotten a lot older since last I saw her.
I'm seated at a table with the groom’s niece and nephews. I've met them all once before, but I don’t remember them individually. I sit next to the niece, the only unmarried of the bunch, a pretty cute professional woman, working in movie production. I was told days before that I had apparently “made a great impression” on her, when we met. As the night plays out, she keeps asking me where I was sleeping. Oh, you have a room here? Oh what’s it like?
Meanwhile,
Three or four years earlier. I was visiting a friend in the capital. I was going somewhere in the morning, I forget where. Point is, limited time frame. I was killing time with my friend browsing Tinder together (in a NOT gay way), roasting what normal women thought was a good idea to write about themselves and sharing a deep sense of despair that all women are exactly the same person, no exceptions.
And then, out of nowhere, I saw the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in my life. Drop dead gorgeous. A slim face, long brown hair, nymph mode but strong - fit. I lost my mind and fell in love immediately. I told my friend. He said, well sure, she looks neat, but he didn't quite get it. He always has been a fool.
I don’t remember what I told her exactly, but something to the effect that she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. Still don’t remember where I was going the next day, somewhere abroad. I asked her out for a cup of coffee, like a dog chasing a car.
We went for a long walk together along the lakes, pretty much just walked around and talked for a couple of hours. She was even more perfect in person. Studying to be a veterinarian. Working in a zoo. Not scared of blood and guts. A dry voice. Smoked. Cackling laughter. Came from money. Everything I look for in a girl. Perfect match.
I was a little intimidated about the money. Both my parents are school teachers and the middle class version of nouveau riche, but what the hell, lady and the tramp, right? She walked me to the metro, we said goodbye, and I didn't want to break her heart by not having time to get romantically involved and fall in love. I thought about her for months, and then I didn't think about her until just now.
Sitting across from me at the table was the girlfriend of one of the male nephews, a man my age, who was unfortunate enough to look like a teenage’d Ben Shapiro. Good guy though. His girlfriend was wearing a low cut dress, and I'm well enough raised to not ogle, and wouldn't have, if it wasn't for her constantly worrying about her tits falling out to a degree that she tugged the cups every eight minutes. (I have a perfect sense of time from being a musical genius)
The first girl I ever liked was a Filipino girl, C, in primary school. We sat next to each other the last two years, and sometimes rubbed our feet against each other under the table. Once, in seventh grade, on her birthday, I gathered a little bouquet of spring flowers, snowdrops and windflowers, on my paper route for her, but pussied out at the last moment and threw them into a hedge near the entrance to the school. We never talked once, except during class.
In winters, we always had heavy snow, and all the boys spent recess by having snowball fights and/or just straight up fights in the snow. Every winter the principal would announce the rules to the entire school on the first day of snow:
Anything goes on the football field, up to (possibly including) manslaughter (depending on circumstances and fair play). If you want to have snowball fights, it’s happening there. Anywhere else on the school, any snow-related violence is strictly verboten.
This was to make it easy for the wimpy kids to avoid getting beaten up. It worked perfectly. Even when the wimpy kids got beaten up and had gravel rubbed in their face with just the minimum amount of snow involved to technically call it a “wash”, as the saying went, you didn't complain. You knew what you signed up for.
Except one winter, C, would come into class after recess, every day, crying, because someone had thrown a snowball at her, unfairly and unprovoked, as she was walking right along the very edge of the football field. And all the girls, of which she was the most popular one (until 7th grade when one who grew breasts early transferred in), gathered to comfort her. It blew my mind. She couldn't be that stupid, right? Just don’t go on the football field. It didn't make any sense to me. She was the smartest one in class. (except for me, of course)
To my right sits the wife of the remaining nephew. She looks like an non-insane version of my last long term girlfriend, who raped me once and broke into my home, once, after we broke up (unrelated incidents). She’s pregnant with their first child, a daughter. When my cousin asks if they know the gender, she says they are expecting a “Little Girl”. I wonder at the adjective. So much meaning in one word. I'm happy for them.
During the time my mother was receiving chemotherapy, I was working one evening as entertainment in a bar, with a girl I had met a few times. She had initially made a good impression on me, as the first time we spoke, she sat in the bar in a red dress (possibly not actually red nor a dress), smoking a cigarette, locking eyes with me as I walked into the room, and saying,
“I know who you are.” — “You should write a book.”
I had not initially expected to ever see her again, but when I saw her again, it was as obvious to me as it should be to you at this point in the text, that there was maybe something there, and found myself really wanting to kiss her and make her do editing for me pro bono. By which I mean in exchange for professional cocksmanship.
I said her name out loud as part of a bit, cleverly disguised so that only she would know it referred to her, because I wanted to impress her with how clever I can be. When I got off the stage, I saw that both my dad, my brother, and my grandmother had tried to call me four or five times, and for a second, I lost my shit, and shot out to the street to call them back, right past You-Should-Write-A-Book-Girl.
Turns out it was just a coincidence, and all of them had just called to chat. 140 heartbeats per minute makes for a strange relieved laughter. Makes you do all sorts of crazy things.
Meanwhile,
When I was six, seven, eight, nine, ten? years old, we had a dachshund. Angry little creature. The breed often have bad tempers. One day, one of my friends came over to play, the dog, for some reason we will never know, snapped, and the moment my friend walked into our house (we didn't lock our front door kind of neighbourhood), lunged at him and took a chunk out of his stomach, before anyone had time to restrain or stop it.
My mother jumped to her feet, and said, without thinking, “That’s it. We’re going to the vet.”
My friend cried out: “But I don’t want to go to the vet!”
I wasn't there though. I was playing video games. I've just heard my mom tell the story. Many, many times.
Relieved that I wasn't going to another funeral, I tried to gather my thoughts, and walked back in. You-Should-Write-A-Book-Girl met me at the door, wanting to talk to me. She had been intimidated and scared that everyone could tell I was talking about her, and felt humiliated and objectified for having been used as entertainment. She didn't say that, that’s me putting words in her mouth. But she had told me earlier that I was right about her, so I feel like I'm probably close.
When I came home that night, I was feeling like absolute shit, and like a big stupid idiot. I was met by one of my female room-mates, who asked what was up. I told her I really needed a pep-talk, because I had been really scared for a minute there, and then I had a bad interaction with a girl I liked, with whom I was at a testing-phase with, because she was scared to be hurt again. That I had overstepped or misstepped, or stepped, and then not followed up on my step. That I hadn't chased her when she wanted to be chased a little, because I was all out of whack emotionally. That I not been enough of a man to cheer her up in a moment of distress, just because I wuz scuaared of my moooom dwying buuh huuh, like a little bitch.
So my room-mate started yelling at me and called me a rapist, because she’s an idiot child raised by the internet, who thought she knew both of us better than either of us, and to whom it’s more important to be able to say “gotcha!” from the rules of the culture games she’s been taught online, than to be a friend, and because our relationship is worth less to her than one millisecond of dopamine from applied pattern recognition, like a baby stuffing geometrical shapes through the right holes.
She jumped at the chance to do so, because she assumed I’d forgive her. Everyone else in her life does.
I went to bed as soon as I figured it was respectable to leave the party. It just happened to coincide with when I noticed one of my dad’s trademark drunk noises some time after dessert, and I bailed before having to be there for him also. He was trying very hard to be a cool, good guy, who didn't have any wrong emotions. My brother isn't a sober drunk, so they would be more on the same wavelength anyhow, I figured.
Lying in bed, I thought about N for the first time in years. N had seen me play with my first shitty band, and had asked our mutual friend, the guitarist, for my telephone number. She started texting me out of nowhere, and we talked on the phone about movies and music for a couple of months, but didn't have much chance to meet until the summer, because we lived in different towns, and were 13 years old.
Then I got run over by a car, and spent a couple of months in the hospital learning to walk, and a couple of years learning to talk in my native language without just blabbering nonsense, lashing out at everyone around me and simmering with a cripple’s rage I didn't have the mental faculties to articulate, and ultimately laid the groundwork for what eventually became my parents divorce by being a very difficult and exceptionally unhappy teenager, which they blamed themselves and each other for, and never had a meaningful resolution from.
When my friend, the guitarist, visited me in the hospital, he told me N had found a boyfriend during the weeks I was out. That made me a little sad.
The next morning I hitch a ride with my brother to the train station. He is hungover and we don’t speak much. That’s that thing about wavelengths. I'm always hungover.
When I get home, one of my female room-mates, who is 27 years old, has never had a real job, only occasionally a fake one, has an expensive degree in the arts, of which she knowns absolutely nothing about beyond that “everything is subjective”, and it’s purely arbitrary and coincidental and entirely without any deeper meaning that she only likes children’s entertainment and candy, who spends her days slumming it with “authentic” cool hipster people on her parents dime, trying to figure out what she wants to do and trying to write a book, was sitting in the outhouse having coffee with a friend. They were discussing how it’s important not to be in a hurry to grow up, to remember your inner child and cherish the small things, such as good food and good company, and having a drink or even sometimes going wild and partying, and forgetting about tomorrow.
The title doesn't mean anything.
Gotcha.
i read all that