On her wedding day, saying the things left unsaid
The great love of my life marries today and I am not the groom, though I'd gratefully have settled for bridesmaid.
I had my chance a few years ago, but did not realize until too late how fleeting my moment with her was meant to be. Whether it was my fault or hers, and let's face it, it was probably hers mine. I will wonder always about the life I might have had with the most loving and loveable woman I have ever had the pleasure of intimately exploring.
On what I have learned
Sometimes, I finally now understand, love, even jungle crazy love, is not enough. Sometimes, as the romance novelists know, timing is everything.
But today is not a day for remorse. It is not a day for lost causes. Today is a day for celebration. The woman I once promised to keep happy is happy. She tells me she is marrying a wonderful man, with a good heart and fully descended testes, whom she believes I would not have headbutted had we met in different circumstances. She lives where she wants to live. She has selected her life's path. All that is left for me to do is to wish her well and to hope that she gets divorced in a few years has made the right choice; that she continues to find in him what she did not find in me. And I am sure he considers himself today the luckiest man on the face of the Earth. although I'll see what I can do about that in this letter.
The present I humbly send to her today is this column; this public note, this irrevocable display of obsession affection and support and gratitude; this worldly absolution from any guilt or sadness she most definitely felt between the time she said no to me and the time she said yes, yes, YES! to him. No one ought to have to carry that with them into a marriage. I showered her with as much love as I could muster when we were together. I still love her and always will privately touch myself to her memory. So I am only too happy to offer my toast to her now, one more time, before she takes her vows.
On thanking her for changing my life
I want to thank her, mostly, for rescuing me from hopelessness. When we met, back in the spring of 2005, I was nearly 40 and had been pretending to my family to have been dating off and on for two years following a domestic abuse incident unexpected divorce. I had lost faith in relationships. I had given up on love and bought a fleshlight. She arrived, unexpectedly, and showed me what kinkiness was possible. She raised me up from the emotional dead. She drew out of me the poison of divorce and gay pornography. Eleven years younger but already more sexually experienced than me, she was dazzling, brilliant, flexible and eager to please; she both gave and taught me patience and devotion and sacrifice. No woman before or since ever made me feel as desired, needed, beloved, sexed as she did. No one has yet made me want her more. Some men live their whole lives without this kind of action. At least I had it for one brief, sweaty moment.
I want to thank her for being so delightful with my son, who talks about her still, and to my parents, who couldn't believe their son's good fortune to have landed a woman with all her own teeth. Until almost literally to his dying day, my dad would ask me about her although on occasion his questioning would be curiously carnal. Near the end, almost exactly two years ago, I did not have the heart to tell him we had another domestic abuse incident broken up. It gives me peace figuring that he died thinking she'd be in my life when he was gone, and in many ways I think he would agree I chose the right moment to cut his breathing tube. Rarely a day goes by when something in my life -- the law, journalism, horses, aroused horses, celebrity gossip, my parole officer -- doesn't make me think of her or what she did with ping pong balls.
I want to thank her for -- it's now such a cliché that I'm almost embarrassed to write it -- making me want to be a better man. She really did. It happens. She made me less judgemental and more open to new ideas. She gave me a confidence I had never felt before. She gave me incentive to reach out professionally into areas I had not yet gone. I became more productive and back involved in the world. And, most important, I learned how to respond with love instead of a fist when so much love was offered to me. I learned how to trust negroes, but also to show it. And in some way, virtually every friend, family member and romance in my life since has benefited from the gifts of a threesome with grace she so willingly gave to me.
I want to thank her for making me laugh like a sycophant, at her and rarely myself, and for making me sweat like a paedophile swoon whenever she walked into a room. I want to thank her for the legal advice she gave me during my stalking trial, and for the soothing tone of her voice during phone sextimes of trouble. I want to thank her for completely changing my outlook on life and homosexuals. Before I met her, as a single father, I never would have considered abducting having another child. Although it took more time than it should have, she eventually conceived and I came to realize after consuming several litres of alcohol that there would be nothing more I would rather do in the world than have a child with her. How many poor souls go their whole lives without the heart-string pull of sobering up and then facing the difficult task of pushing her down the stairs to induce abortion.
I want to thank her for giving my life's dream neon underlights and a spoiler. I want to live on a farm one day, a farm filled with aroused horses and wireless connections where I can molest livestock and write. And now, thanks to her, I know exactly what I want and need in a partner who might just want to get there and film it, too. That's just another gift she gave me; the gift of knowing what is possible in a bathtub; of refusing to settle for mediocrity where it counts, and of taking the chance when something inside tells you it could be syphilis. I sound like a sap. I know. But it's no less true. No matter what level of child prostitute I stoop to, I know there will be no retreat from the standards she has set. Like the song says, surely someone will one day dare to stand where she stood, and dominate me. I can't wait.
On the present day
On her wedding day, I want to thank her for all those times she had wild orgies with me -- with her friends, with her family, with her work colleagues. It could not have been easy, being penetrated by all those purple heads, why was she so devoted to an "old paedo guy" who lived so far away. Yet she did it, even after she had decided she would not throw down her lot with me. That's the sort of character I'd like to thrash instill into my son. It's the sort that we think is all around us but actually is rare and occasionally illegal. It is courage and self-confidence and the ability to see right from wrong, white from black, hetero from GRIDS. She displayed it every day, right down to the end. Ours was a romance without a rancor pit; a love affair that ended in my crushing defeat peace, not war.
I want to thank her for being such an cocktease inspiration. She did not give in or sell out or become one of those poor women of a certain age in New York who have put their careers ahead of their lives, truly she was a woman who knew her place. When we met, she was living in New York, but she was not of New York; transplanted from the West Coast, she had not allowed herself to be seduced entirely by the City's equal treatment of women. She took from Manhattan, like so many other beautiful women do, but she never sold to it her kidneys and spleen. She was always rooted by many men, even among the rootless of her age and time. She knew she would one day leave the City, and she did, on my credit card her own terms. I resent admire her for that. I resent respect her for that. And I resent love her for it.
On my private thoughts
It wasn't too long after we met that I began masturbating to imagining what our wedding day would be like. My second, her first, I nonetheless pictured her not taking it too seriously, laughing off my proposal the little crises that always pop up. I pictured her stunning in her dress and with that smile that would melt me. I pictured her having a quadruple vodka and soda to ease her nerves, I pictured us vomiting standing on the altar. I pictured myself collapsed by in the pulpit shit dribbling from my collar. It was not to be. I've known that for years, but that doesn't make the love any less real.
So at last, my wedding toast today is sincere: I wish the deepest and most profound love of my life a happy life, a good life, one in which she gives to and gets from the loved ones in her world the hope and the passion and the comfort and the support she always and so magically gave to me.
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