Did you miss Monday’s Fake-iversary Part One? This might make more sense if you catch up over there first. Trust me, you don’t want to miss that hot mess. I talk about awkward teenage love and stalking.
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There’s something about talking on the telephone with a friend you haven’t seen in twelve years.
It’s called confusion.
You’re confused because you have a tenuous grasp on what this person looks like now, but your mind only has a picture, sent via email, to process. What does this man look like when he isn’t turned at a 23 degree angle to the camera? More importantly, does his backside still look good after all these years?
Over a few long phone calls, we bridged old adolescent love to a new adult spark.
He asked to come visit.
(Hmmm…. just a few weeks ago, you admitted that you looked me up multiple times over a twelve-year span and now you want to fly all the way from Miami to Los Angeles to visit. I’d better be careful and guard my heart like the responsible, levelheaded adult I am.)
“Sure, I’m free a week from next Tuesday. Come on over.”
(Just because he’s here to visit does not mean I have to spend all of my time with him. He has other friends here in Los Angeles. We can keep it casual and fun. I will play hard-to-get. I have an interesting and full life. I am a busy woman.)
We spent every day over the next week together.
A week after he arrived, I had already gotten ready for bed when he came over and we stayed up late, talking and revealing things that two people who like each other, but hardly know each other, tend to reveal. During a lull in the conversation, he took my hand and smiled. I smiled back. He obviously took that as a good sign, because he asked me to marry him.
(NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! Not in my Tweety Bird nightgown. Press the pause button. Let me change into something beautiful and give me a chance to throw on some lip gloss.)
I said “yes.” His impeccable timing and forethought won me over.
Just a week and a half later, we said our “I Do’s” in Las Vegas with Elvis crooning next door. I left the chapel with a shiny new husband and a ceremony video, skillfully shot so that fully three of the fourteen minutes showed me primping and checking my teeth in the back room mirror before I walked down the aisle.
Has this ever happened to you?
Me: (elated) I can’t believe I’m married!
Friend: ………..
Me: Hello?
Friend: …… I wasn’t aware that you were dating anybody.
Imagine that conversation again, but this time, replace the friend with your own mother, and in this make-believe scenario, make sure she doesn’t have a firm hold on the English language. And pretend that she misunderstood “married” for some girlfriend “Mary” who was visiting you, and didn’t think anything until you showed up at her doorstep… with your husband… whom you married in Vegas… after an eighteen-day courtship.
Continue to imagine the fodder this gives your mother, who is still coming to grips with your teen pregnancy seven years earlier.
You’d agree to have another wedding, just to appease this make-believe mother, wouldn’t you?
I thought so.
It worked out. Now, I get two wedding anniversaries. The “real” one in September and the “fake-iversary” in October. I still expect gifts for both.
photo via blueq.com
