Sometimes it seems to glow with it’s own light. Other times, like last night, it seems to suck all the light into it, making it a dark, shadowy figure over by the door, hanging off the door. I’ve become almost obsessive about not brushing against it as I walk past. Whenever I’m in the bedroom, my eyes are automatically drawn to it like a television set, and while I haven’t seen it move of it’s own accord yet, I suspect that after I fall asleep at night, it rustles over to me and whispers things in my ear. “You’re day is over and now there’s nothing left to look forward to”, “You have no other plans for your life”, “You have to get me cleaned soon or those muddy foot prints and that lipstick smudge will stain permanently”. It could be that’s why I’m having trouble sleeping these days and all the sleep I get is accompanied by boring dreams of me working at an office, filing the same paper over and over again, or me walking down a hallway, then walking down that hallway again, then again.
I wouldn’t say I miss the pre-wedding days exactly. I remember the moments of freak-out, the angry phone calls and the constant feeling of anxiety, which mutated into nausea towards the end. But at least then I was working for something that was important to me, and headed towards an achievable goal. Back then I spent a lot of time browsing through the wedding section of craigslist and repeatedly came across the term “Trash the dress”. Do you know about this trend? I suspected at the time that it was a conspiracy of the wedding industry attempting to limit the number of second had dresses being sold. The idea is that you have your wedding day, then after you return from the honeymoon, you hire a photographer to take pictures of you destroying your wedding gown. Women paint a mural in it, or go to fields of greasy old broken down cars and lounge around in them, or go swimming in the ocean, and I even came across a frightening photograph of a women wearing a dress that’s on fire. I was completely disgusted by “trash the dress”. I thought it was horribly irresponsible and wasteful until I read an article written by some TTD photographers who said that generally after a shoot the dress isn’t so damaged that a good cleaning wouldn’t fix it (unless of course you were the women who set the thing on fire). And the fact is the pictures that result from these photo sessions are absolutely breathtaking. I understood it better when I considered it from an artist’s perspective, but I still didn’t understand why brides felt compelled to ruin dresses that could be donated, or saved or sold. After two weeks of having it stare at me from the corner of my bedroom, it’s become mind-bogglingly clear, and I want that dress destroyed. I want to dowse it in gasoline and watch it explode. I want to tie it around a boulder and hurl it off a cliff into the ocean, I want to abandon it across some railroad tracks, or down a urine soaked alley of San Francisco. I want it so thoroughly out of my life that it’s not even an object anymore, it’s an unrecognizable shred of something that used to exist.
Before anyone starts getting nervous, let me assure you that this is just a desire, not a plan. I realize that actually chucking my wedding gown in front of a moving BART train would, and should, make people a little concerned about my sanity. If I were reading this a month ago, I know I would wonder about the person writing it. And even now my cognitive powers fall a little short of grasping why this impulse is so strong. But I’m smart enough to know that it’s massively idiotic to ruin anything that could pay for at least one months rent should I decide to sell it someday. Still, before I get it cleaned, I might take it for another whirl. Visit the farmers market, go for a run on the beach, wait at a bus-stop for awhile (actually taking the bus would be torture though), buy an ice cream cone, walk across the Golden Gate bridge, go do my laundry (“Hey, I was out of clean clothes, ok?”). Sometimes I think people need a little more surreality in their lives.