36. The Build Up

A Memoir in 65 Postcards & The Recovery Diaries

Yesterday a package arrived from my brother’s office, a file of things my father had kept, the notice of my birth, letters from me to him, addresses of all the places I have lived from Zimbabwe to Australia, and among it all was the newspaper article about my wedding in the woods. That’s what happens when you open cupboards, all this stuff flies out, brothers, without warning, send you packages they meant to send you years ago but forgot. That’s when you know you’re onto something. We announced the wedding at the Bonnington Café and pandemonium broke out which in hippie speak means we sat around smoking spliffs and dreaming big. A hand fasting. A three-day party. I would ride side-saddle. His band would play. The commune set to clearing a place high up in the forest that gave a small platform of flat; it was thick with bracken, it was where the biggest sequoias grew, still grow, I stood there yesterday and remembered. It’s a sea of dense green again now and the altar has crumbled, just a stone sticking up like a lighthouse if you know where to look, but twenty-six years ago four hundred people gathered there in all their finery, ribbons and an altar and a horse and you and me; you in a suit made from your granny’s curtains and me with silk butterflies tied between my toes. We planned everything, how your granny would be carried in a litter built by the carpenter, how I would ride side-saddle through the woods dressed in white. You invited everyone. Friendly chats stopped at traffic lights resulted in invitations being passed out of windows. Your best friend and guitarist from the band was to be best man. And this is why I must tell it in parts, just a little today, the build-up, the dreams, and tomorrow what happened because no matter what we planned other plans were happening too. While I learnt to ride side-saddle on my mother’s horse, rehearsing the balance, you rehearsed the songs you would sing to me and he rehearsed something else, he must have, it was so orchestrated. And the energy built and the sequoias towered and the band practised and I know why this is so hard to write, and so do you.