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TALES OF AN ORANGEPEELER

an archive of pleasures, wounds, sublimations
& other curiosities :: profile


12.01.21


Last week we attended a wedding of one of the husband’s cousins. In pre-covid times, an Irish wedding would have lasted until the late bar closed, around four or five in the morning. At my own wedding, I didn’t lurch into bed until after six am. Now it's swift: secular ceremony at half one, followed by champagne reception, dinner at three, finger food at nine (when it would have been out at midnight), dancing in between until midnight, when the bar closed, everyone rushing to order a brace of drinks and wandering into hotel rooms for trysts or impromptu parties.

During the wedding speeches, I could tell the bride was uncomfortable. She was after all on display. The groom had made a video conveying messages of congratulations from Irish rugby players. There was an awkward moment: it got stuck, the same snippet playing over and over again. Listening to well wishes on repeat, the bride fidgeted with her dress, looking a bit peeved.

At times it seemed as if the bride was resisting the whole idea of it: the wedding itself. Sometimes she cast side glances or closed her eyes, as if she couldn’t believe this, THIS, was happening. Her brother said she was the last person anyone could think of getting married, and she laughed, eye casting wildly to the side, as if looking for the exit.

I suppose it was all very strange for her, to be pinned down finally and forced to ‘fess up to her heart’s desire in front of so many people, even if they were the closest and dearest to her. Or maybe it was just strange to me. I don’t ever talk or write about love these days. In my twenties, I used to write about love as if you could write about love earnestly, as if there was so much of it, you couldn’t ever lose it. I could write on and on about my first love: how enclosed we were in our own world, and what I observed of him, sometimes writing about him as if he was a half-wild, maybe immortal creature conferring its presence in my life like a strange and wonderful blessing. In the dust on so many windows in Oakland, we’d scribble our initials, ending with “4EVA”. At 25, you can’t imagine the end of the world, so you could write about love freely, as if it was the sky.

Only later, in my thirties, did I realise that what I wrote was what I could bear observing. If I wrote about the unbearable parts, I wrote them as if I saw them out of the corner of my eye, things that happened to other people, over there, where I failed to intervene. Because of course we sometimes do bad things, to others, to ourselves, for love, or an idea of it.

So now I can’t ever talk about love, not explicitly. Not in a full-frontal way, with all my bits hanging out, flapping in the wind. I’m too embarrassed. Or too middle-aged. Rather, I might write about gestures instead, the little acts of no consequence to anyone else but a discerning reader (even if that reader is only me). My mother never praised us out of fear: the bad spirits might overhear and steal us away. Perhaps it’s the same with you-know-what.




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