Something Borrowed

The dress fits.

This is the first thing she knows, standing at the back of a room full of flowers and people and the specific, orchestrated reverence of an occasion that has been planned to within an inch of its life. The dress fits the way dresses fit when they have been altered specifically for the body wearing them, when a woman with pins in her mouth has stood behind you in a dressing room and said there, and meant it, and the there was your exact shape rendered in ivory silk.

The dress fits.

She does not know when she tried it on.

This is the second thing she knows, which is to say the second thing she doesn't, which is to say the gap has begun to announce itself.

The music is playing.

Everyone is standing.

She is walking.

---

Her feet know the aisle.

This is the thing that will unsettle her most, later, in the accounting she will do of the day. Not the faces she doesn't recognize. Not the flowers whose variety she could not have named. Not the man at the end of the aisle, who is looking at her with an expression so full of everything that she has to look away from it because the everything is directed at her and she does not know him and the not-knowing makes the everything a thing she cannot receive.

Her feet know the aisle.

She is walking at the correct pace.

Her hands are holding the bouquet at the correct height.

Her face is doing something that the room is receiving as the correct thing, the something that is making the women in the front rows press tissues to the corners of their eyes and making the men in the middle rows do the thing men do at weddings when they are trying not to do the thing men do at weddings.

Her body is doing the wedding.

Her mind is standing very still in the center of a blank room, turning slowly, looking for the door.

---

When did you agree to this.

She asks herself this at the third pew, which she knows is the third pew because she is counting without deciding to count, which is the method, which has apparently always been the method, which is one of the few things she knows about herself with any confidence.

She counts things.

She counts the pews and the faces and the flower arrangements and the candles on the altar and the number of steps between her current position and the man at the end of the aisle, who is still looking at her with the everything, who has not stopped looking at her with the everything, who is going to keep looking at her with the everything until she arrives at him and then something is going to happen that she is not prepared for because she cannot remember agreeing to it.

When did you agree to this.

The blank where the answer should be is not the blank of a forgotten thing. She has forgotten things. She knows what forgetting feels like, the specific, retrievable quality of a memory that is there and not accessible, that will surface with the right prompt, the right smell, the right song.

This is not that.

This is the blank of a thing that is not there.

Not forgotten.

Absent.

The last three years are absent.

She is walking through flowers toward a man she does not know in a dress she cannot remember trying on with a room full of people who love her and she does not know a single one of them.

Her feet know the aisle.

She keeps walking.

---

The man at the end of it has good hands.

She notices this because she is a person who notices things and because the noticing is the only tool she currently has available and she is using it with the focused, desperate efficiency of someone conducting a field assessment with inadequate equipment.

Good hands. Tall. The specific kind of handsome that accumulates rather than announces, that is not the first thing you'd note about a face and is the thing you'd note about it longest. He is wearing a suit that fits the way her dress fits, which is to say specifically, which is to say someone stood behind him with pins at some point and said there, and he has the look of a man who has been waiting for this specific moment and has been certain of it for long enough that the certainty has become a quality of his face.

He is certain of her.

She is certain of nothing.

She arrives at him.

She looks at his hands.

His hands find hers.

They are warm, his hands, which is either irrelevant or the most important data point she has collected so far and she cannot determine which and this is the condition of all the data she is currently collecting, relevant or irrelevant, she cannot tell, she has no prior information to calibrate against, she is running an operating system with no prior data and the operating system is performing a wedding.

You look beautiful, he says.

His voice is the voice of someone who has said things to her before. The register of it, the specific tone of a man speaking to a woman he knows so completely that the knowing is in the frequency of the speaking, in the warmth that is not performed but accumulated, earned, the warmth of years.

She does not have the years.

She has the dress, and the flowers, and the hands, and the blank.

Thank you, she says.

Her voice does this correctly.

Her voice has apparently been doing things correctly for years without her conscious participation.

She files this.

---

The officiant begins.

He is a man of perhaps sixty with the specific quality of a person who has done this many times and understands that the ceremony is the container and the content is the people inside it, and his job is to hold the container steady while the people do what people do inside ceremonies, which is feel things at a volume they don't usually permit themselves.

He says the words ceremonies begin with.

The room does what rooms do at the beginning of ceremonies, which is settle, which is the collective exhalation of a group of people who have been anticipating and are now inside the anticipated, who can release the before and be in the during.

She is in the during.

The during has no before, for her.

Or rather: the before has been removed.

She stands in the during of her own wedding and she looks at the man whose hands are holding hers and she thinks: I must have loved you. I must have loved you specifically and completely and in the way that produces this, that brings two hundred people to a room and fills the room with flowers and puts a woman in a dress that fits and brings her down an aisle at the correct pace with her hands at the correct height and her face doing the correct thing.

I must have loved you.

She looks at his face.

His face is looking at her with the everything.

I must still love you, she thinks. It's in here somewhere. It went with the years. When the years come back the love will be in them.

If the years come back.

The officiant says: who comes to witness this union.

The room says: we do.

The room says it with the specific, collective warmth of people who have been waiting for this, who have been in the before of this, who have the full context she is missing and are pouring it into the response, two hundred people saying we do with the weight of knowing these two people, this specific man and this specific woman in the dress that fits, and wanting this for them.

She stands in the wanting.

She does not share it, not with the full possession of the one who is wanted-for.

She stands in it as a visitor.

She is very good at standing in things.

---

Think.

She gives herself this instruction at the second reading, which she knows is the second reading because there was a first one, which means someone planned a program, which means there is a program, which means somewhere in the room or in the clutch in the hand of the woman in the front row who keeps looking at her with the specific, fond warmth of someone who has known her a long time, there is a program with the names of the readings and the name of the officiant and the names of the two people being married.

Her name is on a program.

She does not know her name.

She knows her name. She has always known her name. Her name is Mara, which she knows with the specific, unconditional certainty of a thing that lives below the blank, below the absent years, in the original architecture of a self that was there before whatever happened to the three years happened to them.

She is Mara.

She is in a dress.

She is holding the hands of a man she doesn't know who loves her completely.

She is in the middle of a ceremony that two hundred people are witnessing with the full investment of people who know the story and are here for the ending.

She does not know the story.

She is the ending.

Think.

What does she know.

The dress fits. The aisle was correct. The flowers are peonies, which she knows because she knows the name of peonies, which is the kind of information that lives below the blank. She knows the names of flowers. She knows the pew-count. She knows that the woman in the front row with the clutch is important to her, can feel the importance the way you feel a word at the tip of the tongue, present without being retrievable.

She knows his hands are warm.

She knows, in the specific body-knowing that lives below the mind's knowing, below the blank, in the same place as her name and the names of flowers and the counting without deciding to count, that she has held these hands before.

That these hands are known to her.

Not consciously. Not in the retrievable way.

In the way of the body.

In the way of the dress that fits.

---

The officiant says: do you take this man.

The room holds its breath.

Two hundred people hold their breath for her, which is the specific, collective suspension of a group of people at the moment of the thing they came for.

She looks at the man.

His hands are warm.

His face is the face of someone who has been looking at her face for years.

The blank is there.

The blank is very there.

And underneath the blank, below the absent years, in the place where the body keeps what the mind cannot reach, in the architecture of a self that has been built by years she cannot currently access but which built her nonetheless, which are in her the way the foundation is in the building, invisible from inside but load-bearing, holding everything up:

something.

Not memory.

Not the years themselves, returned.

Something older than the years and more permanent. The specific quality of a decision that has been made so thoroughly it has moved out of the cognitive and into the structural, that is no longer a decision but a condition, the way certain things stop being choices and become facts.

She has chosen this.

She does not remember choosing.

The choosing is in her anyway.

I do, she says.

Her voice does not waver.

The room releases its breath.

His hands tighten on hers.

His eyes, which have been looking at her with the everything, do something she does not have the history to name but which the body receives as: known. Safe. Home.

The blank is still there.

The blank will be there through the vows and the rings and the pronouncement and the kiss and the walking back up the aisle at a pace her feet know.

The blank will be there at the reception and the first dance and the speeches from people whose faces she cannot place.

And she will stand in all of it with the specific, quiet competence of a woman who has decided, in the absence of memory, to trust the evidence.

The evidence: a dress that fits. Hands that are warm. A room full of people who love her. A body that walked the aisle correctly. A voice that said I do without wavering.

The evidence: she chose this.

She chose it before the blank.

She would choose it again.

She is choosing it now.

---

The years will come back.

Or they won't.

She is standing in a ceremony in a dress that fits, holding the hands of a man who loves her completely, in a room full of people who are witnesses to the fact of her, and the fact of her is here, is present, is doing the wedding with the full, quiet competence of a woman who trusts the evidence of her own life even when the evidence is all she has.

The officiant says: you may kiss the bride.

She looks at the man.

He is looking at her with the everything.

She lets him.

She lets the everything land.

She kisses him back with the specific warmth of a body that knows what the mind has temporarily lost, that is carrying the years until she can carry them herself, that has been doing this all along.

His hands are warm.

She is Mara.

The dress fits.

---

She will remember on a Thursday in November.

Not all of it.

Enough.

She will be making coffee.

He will come into the kitchen.

He will say her name.

And the years will come back in the specific, quiet flood of a thing that was always there and needed only the right word in the right voice to find its way home.

She will stand at the coffee maker with the years in her and she will turn and look at him and she will know everything.

She will know why she said I do.

She will know why she meant it.

She will know that the blank was not an absence.

It was a test of the evidence.

She passed.

She always passes.

She is very good at trusting what the body knows when the mind goes quiet.

He hands her the coffee.

She knows his hands.

She has always known his hands.

She takes the cup.

She says:

I remember.

He says:

I know.

He has always known.

That's why he waited.

That's the whole reason he waited.