Wedding Cake
We had met at a wedding. I had been immediately drawn to him, his open warm face, his colourful clothes, his braces that had three different types of bird printed on them, the original Latin names written under in an italic scrawl. Of course, I’d known about his history, through one of his oldest friends with whom I used to live: the wild hedonism that had trickled into addiction, the lost years, his habit of disappearing. The wedding was the first time he had seen some of his oldest friends in years. Later he would tell me how difficult this had been, how he’d practised the smile I had been so mesmerized by in the mirror over and over again, desperate to been seen as ok. I too, had been feeling a similar pressure that day, to be fun and to try and shake the feeling of being examined by those around you, a search for little cracks in the mask. Maybe that is what had drawn us to each other, we were the best ones at pretending.
