We had chosen this date for its solar aspect obviously. We wanted it to be bright, vibrant and focused on the performative side of things. We wanted the longest day of the year to get married, for the sun to stop disappearing, for us to say something like “they married and had many children!” », with an ending full of fireworks above a sort of internalized Disney castle.
We wanted to celebrate love in tune with our century: on the bright side of things, relegating the shadow to others, most often projecting it onto all those who would not make it, while we would make it, we believing above everything, especially life.
Around 50% of marriages end in divorce, but we would escape the statistics, in this attitude which suited our ages so well at the time, while we presented to existence a rebellious attitude, falsely sure of itself – even, unsteady within, conquering without.
We had set up a large table that extended into the courtyard adjoining the house, hung lights, pennants and banners, with our parents and our sisters, who had transformed the whole thing into an Italian film set (with a budget of less than $2000 .) My father-in-law had played the celebrant, constantly afraid of naming me like the ex of the man I was going to marry. We laughed at his boxes on which he had written in big letters: NATHALIE. “Yes, Nathalie, André, Nathalie my name! »
We called all our friends and family together and dared to ask loved ones to take planes to come to us. My father had led me to the altar, in this archetypal scene which, for some, takes on a nameless ridicule, but which, for me, still evokes something of the deep ritual. It was not so much a girl delivered to a man by her father as a mark of the passing of this generational baton, in the great relay race of our lineages. It was “my turn” now, so to speak.
Glenn Gould (Goldberg Variations), Then Rebellion (Lies) of Arcade Fire had sounded. We would remain a little rebellious all the same, while we tried to fit into a very small square something immense like love, time, the ages ahead. We had learned a crazy bride and groom dance, with interventions from the groomsmen, and it was Beastie Boys who opened the ball. At 5 a.m., to honor French roots, we had cooked onion soup with way too much white wine. At night, we drank, danced, ate; our marriage supplanted any idea of darkness.
And already in the aftermath, the days had begun to do exactly what we expect them to after a summer solstice: shorten. Over the years that would follow, all around us, our friends would go through turbulences similar to ours, carried by this need to sometimes live existences that do not seem to be able to combine, touching on the cardboard limits of the illusions that we erect. around our stories as lovers, all those times when we need to contain our desires, to break our impulses towards elsewhere, to restore ourselves every day as new lovers, to allow ourselves to control the other in the name of love, to give us permission to extinguish each other… out of love. And as with all important adventures in our lives, no standard guide would allow us to avoid traveling our personal path.
Quietly, we had to recognize that, there as elsewhere, we were neither superior nor different from everyone else. We were just deeply human, discovering how complex this idea of the couple was. This vision that it is absolutely necessary to live it on the one and only model proposed, the one which allows a society to continue to move forward, making it consume and renew by compensation an impression of being alive in situations which, sometimes, are moribund , gradually seized and depressed us.
We let ourselves down often.
But, every summer solstice, we found each other, no matter the state of things between us. We walked together again in the places where we met, we talked about our inner lives, we tried to learn this posture that is so difficult for us, humans: this humility in the face of the event of life. Today I look back on these years with a lot of gratitude for the tested young people that we were. We learned so many things, discovering each other, more authentically every day it seems to me, in addition to remaining parents, of “many children”. Yes, that part was indeed the only one that was exactly like in the fairy tales.
Then, there was the shift, my illness against the backdrop of a pandemic, like an enormous suspension of action, a sort of freeze frame where everything was fixed, this moment when we were subjected to forces which surpassed us by a thousand and one leagues. Under the seas, where the light only comes fleetingly but dazzlingly, we then rediscovered that we were there for each other, always as in a true “always”, neither flamboyant nor flashy, only resolutely there. And this discovery, very simple, so simple in the end, was enough to weld together something of our true union. There are babies, new couples, divorces, pandemic dogs and cats. There are also “marriages saved” from the pandemic.
At the end of that year, we remarried, but on the winter solstice this time, as if to honor our shadows too. In the cold, when I barely had any hair on my head, we repeated the ritual of choosing ourselves, accepting the fact that we could not conquer anything at all, neither the divorce statistics nor those of the risk of recurrence .
And this Friday we will celebrate the 10e summer solstice since this first celebration. André has left us, the children have grown up, some friendships have fallen apart, but there will be the two of us, who will walk again in the places of our beginnings, as a ritual for the time that has passed, honoring the chance we have to having escaped the end — all ends — and by accepting a little more each day to deal with the mystery of this other who shares our life.
*I’m taking a break for the next two weeks. This will allow me to make up for lost time on the stories received since the spring, to respond to you and also publish a few selected stories.