Postponed

A comprehensive budget was drafted and practically all the money to cover it had already been saved well before the check showed up in the mail. The deposits were already put down, guest lists had been whittled, and paper invitations designed but thankfully never ordered. By the time the check arrived, things with that new coronavirus had just gotten serious enough to reconsider a summer wedding, anyway.

It wasn't just the uncertainty of the pandemic that kept the check relegated to a treacherous existence on the kitchen island for more than a few weeks, during which it narrowly escaped scalding splatters from the dripping coffee pot and accidentally being sorted into the to be recycled pile. The check's entire existence was cause for apprehension, with the words Wedding Expenses written along the memo line in such assuring and neat block letters, as if this had been part of the plan all along.

Independent of its increasingly pocked appearance from the greasy crumbs the cat insisted on leaving everywhere but in his food bowl and being the catalyst for too many of Al's raised eyebrows and hard exhales upon rediscovering it under yet another pile of unsorted mail, the $20,000 check was, eventually, rescued from the island and taken to the bank.

It was interesting that a college professor’s death was what prompted the deposit. Rereading the text message from earlier that day announcing he had died, masked and standing six feet away from everyone else waiting for the next available teller, memories of the professor seemed to take up all the space amassed in social distancing practices. The Converse sneakers he always wore. His uncomfortably good posture. How he would always place his pen parallel to his notes after picking it up to write or emphasize something. The unfortunate pit stains he so boldly displayed as he gave the welcoming lecture at freshman orientation.

The way he'd hold eye contact just a little too long.

And then there were the memories of housesitting his little southside bungalow with two friends--fellow temporary nomads for those days between graduation and when summer leases started. The late-May humidity was uncomfortable in anything other than underwear while laying shoulder-to-sticky-shoulder in his full-sized bed, passing a jar of peanut butter and a single spoon back and forth as DVDs played on someone's overheating laptop.

It hadn’t taken long to discover that the bottom shelf of the bookcase in his bedroom was filled with his old journals. The cheap marbled notebooks dated back to his college years. By the time he landed in an Ivy League MFA program, some of the content turned salacious and would be read aloud in giddy exchanges between episodes of Grey’s. However, the bulk of his entries were poured over alone in stretches late into the nights while the others slept. It was an urgent pursuit to devour every unexciting and unexceptional account along with things that'd never be said out loud, to try to know him completely.

Some years after he moved past the disillusioned sentiment that he was being kept from his lofty pursuits in publishing fiction by teaching creative writing, and once the saudade he experienced upon realizing things with the former student fizzled past the point of repair turned into a gentler kind of wistfulness, he composed a one-sentence entry.

I think I'm going to spend my life alone--and that's ok.

You closed the journal immediately. You dusted his entire room so he wouldn’t notice the bottom shelf’s lack of it.

He did spend the rest of his life alone. Well, that's not entirely true. When he died, he was in the care of his sweet neighbors, the only other kidless long-haulers on a street with a healthy rotation of young and growing families. And even when he was sick, he always had visitors, you were told. He was alone in that he never became part of a unit, forever in the company of others, but never making a home with another.

Move the laundry upstairs, get one of those natural gas generators, hire a landscaper to fix that spot in the backyard with the standing water and get rid of all the poison ivy along the property line. Really splurge and get matching kitchen appliances. The enumeration of all the ways to spend the money pauses while Al takes a sip of champagne.

It could go towards debt, too. Or retirement. Or kids.

There hadn’t seemed to be many strings attached to the money--a few more family friends added to the guest list for the now officially postponed wedding. The money was really free to be used for whatever. Al gets up to refill the flutes.

What about a really nice honeymoon? Would have been nice to know about this when we were buying the house, huh?

Al’s better at operating as a unit. Not only in speaking, adopting the use of first person plural pronouns very early in the relationship, but also in action. The down payment for the house was covered entirely by Al. The mortgage, while paid monthly out of a joint account, is exclusively in Al’s immaculate credit-bearing name. And despite the fact that the check for wedding expenses was not made out to Al, nor was it deposited into the joint account, it seemed to be immediately filed under ours.

You think about the little bungalow as Al sets a drink in front of you and moves a hand up your thigh. Would 20k be enough down to afford a house that size on a single income? You think about the journals and all the other books that lined the wall of the bedroom and recollect the smell of old and sun bleached paper into your mind until your sinuses start to tingle and a shudder runs down your spine. Al mistakes the cause of your response and presses a thumb deeper into your thigh.

It wasn’t until grad school that the notion of spending a life alone stopped sounding shameful. It still scared you, and you most often entertained it as some sort of punishment for not being good enough, but by then, you recognized a strength that came with it and were envious of the control, or at that point, the chaos, that could occur therein. After your early twenties and trying to do all the right things and never feeling any happier for it, it was tempting to just let go. You wanted to lock yourself in a room for a week and eat only tubs of frosting. Or you wanted to bring home friendly strangers from bars without having to worry about waking your roommates. You wanted to sleep for a month and then run your fingers over your ribcage and feel the bones sticking out, reveling in how much weight you’d lose through starving yourself. You wanted somewhere to break that no one would see or care about the mess it made.

You thought you found that with a second-year. Thick-framed glasses with the makings of a smoker’s cough. Self-proclaimed horrible person with an entirely unfair aptitude in sonic poetry and a drinker, like you. The soft leather cover of a little black notebook was deliciously worn and curved from being toted everywhere either in the back pocket of dark washed denim and habitually wrung in a pair of hands much larger than your own. The only time you saw them separated was when you stumbled upon the notebook at the foot of your bed the morning after an exceptionally rowdy bender. You regarded the abandoned Moleskine for a moment and as you picked it up you wondered if it became dislodged in the rush to pull off its owner’s pants last night, or to put them back on again before you woke this morning.

Collapsing back into bed, you idly flipped through the pages mixed with couplettes and class notes, until you came across something else entirely.

Check if Homeward Bound is on Netflix.

Despite the rough exterior and all the brown liquor, this was not someone who could disregard the mess you wanted to make, not for long.

The most responsible thing to do would be to pay down debt, Al agrees as you both stand at the double vanity, lips kiss-swollen and bodies littered in splotches from where they pressed together. Al slides the floss over to you, and you halfheartedly wiggle a strand between your teeth, thinking about all the years of interest you wouldn’t have had to pay if you knew about this money.

You let your eyes wander Al’s frame. Being holed up through a pandemic felt confining. You yearned for moments to stretch and breathe outside this house, outside this relationship. It was right before you met Al that being alone was something you stopped fearing altogether and that you had started to expect. Had you had the money then, would you have bought a little house in that southside neighborhood? Passed on Al in favor of a less complicated life? Your eyes meet in the mirror.

“I liked the idea of a really nice honeymoon,” you say.