The alligator is getting closer and the pastor is talking about how we never really know each other. Weddings in movies look like this. The water at the edge of the backyard, where a temporary dance floor has been built over a chlorine-blue pool, is the green of secrets and gothic stories about this part of the world, the green of swamps and family resentments, the poisonous green that built a country, staining out into a coastline, the green of wet fields and the damp silence under leaves, the hope of getting there first, before anyone knows. The ocean is maybe a hundred steps away, over the backs of the facing houses. Apparently the alligator was gone for a long time after the hurricanes that flashed through this gated neighborhood on this rich and green-weighted island at the end of last year and turned roads into rivers and driveways into swamps. They thought he’d been lost, died or washed out to sea. We’re glad he’s back but we don’t want him to come any closer. Except that I do, except that I always do. When thunderstorms were predicted for the exact time of the wedding ceremony, part of me wanted them to happen. I wanted the story, the big event. It’s the same part of me that hopes for cancelled flights and emergencies, that wants something to have happened to me, the part of me that hopes the alligator will crawl up on the deck and we’ll all have to run and hide in the house. In predicted crisis I imagine myself into a movie, as though all the worries and obligations of my normal life might be stopped, put on indefinite pause, ceding to the largeness of an out of place event, a thunderstorm, a delayed plane, infinite time, second chances. I guess we hope weddings, and love, might do this same thing. The ceremony is starting; everyone stands.
alligator
alligator
alligator
The alligator is getting closer and the pastor is talking about how we never really know each other. Weddings in movies look like this. The water at the edge of the backyard, where a temporary dance floor has been built over a chlorine-blue pool, is the green of secrets and gothic stories about this part of the world, the green of swamps and family resentments, the poisonous green that built a country, staining out into a coastline, the green of wet fields and the damp silence under leaves, the hope of getting there first, before anyone knows. The ocean is maybe a hundred steps away, over the backs of the facing houses. Apparently the alligator was gone for a long time after the hurricanes that flashed through this gated neighborhood on this rich and green-weighted island at the end of last year and turned roads into rivers and driveways into swamps. They thought he’d been lost, died or washed out to sea. We’re glad he’s back but we don’t want him to come any closer. Except that I do, except that I always do. When thunderstorms were predicted for the exact time of the wedding ceremony, part of me wanted them to happen. I wanted the story, the big event. It’s the same part of me that hopes for cancelled flights and emergencies, that wants something to have happened to me, the part of me that hopes the alligator will crawl up on the deck and we’ll all have to run and hide in the house. In predicted crisis I imagine myself into a movie, as though all the worries and obligations of my normal life might be stopped, put on indefinite pause, ceding to the largeness of an out of place event, a thunderstorm, a delayed plane, infinite time, second chances. I guess we hope weddings, and love, might do this same thing. The ceremony is starting; everyone stands.