The last time I was gathered with my whole family was February 29, 2020. Leap Day.
It was a bridal shower tea party at a fancy hotel in Philadelphia. When my mother first asked if we wanted a bridal shower, I balked. Emily and I had spent year before we got engaged, trying to untangle the conditions of marriage from the definition of queerness, the effects of assimilation on queer lives, what marriage meant to those we loved, what marriage meant to us. Wasn’t a bridal shower a capitalist construct designed around gender and domestic expectations?
We were getting married because we were building a home within one another. It was also a chance to let the people we love celebrate us, just as we wanted to celebrate them for being part of the home we were building within one another. Why say no to a party? Why say no to joy?
In the past year, I have often gone back to look at photos of this joyful day, to see the beloved family and the beautiful food and the light from the windows. My mother decorated the table with little books as party favors, a white lace parasol, a golden banner that read “Cheers to Love.” Aunts and cousins and friends came to toast us enthusiastically. I piled the ribbons on my head, tradition.
The hotel was famous for being the hotel where Legionnaires’ disease started, airborne during a conference at the hotel, the American Legion Conference of 1976. In the elevator at one point my mother said out loud, “Wouldn’t it be terrible if you have to cancel your wedding because of Coronavirus?” Collective death and isolation were specters fast approaching. I sometimes find myself obsessed with this moment, before the lockdown, before my panic attack on the subway when I couldn’t stop thinking about the air we were all breathing, breathing, underground. My family loves me, and they love Emily. Our bridal party tea spilled over to an Irish pub around the corner from the hotel, where cousins and Uncles came and joined us for big plates of fries and burgers. There were twelve or fourteen of us crowded around two tables across from the bar. It’s the last time I ate in a restaurant.
On February 29th, there was also a wedding at the hotel. We all watched from a long table as the bride - blue hair, tattoos - stood on the balcony while the groom came to see her for the first time, the photographer clicking away. Later we would be in the elevator with her, all of us squished with her and her dress and her bridesmaids. It’s unthinkable now. When I look at the photos from our bridal shower, my anxiety ramps up, wanting to draw masks over everyone. Wanting to protect us from what cannot be yet seen.
One more: the final gathering in the before times. It had been on the calendar for awhile: March 7th, 2020. A friend had seen on our wedding registry that we wanted to have our honeymoon in Italy. She offered to have us over for pie with her dear friend from college and his husband, her friend having lived and taught in Italy for years. He would give us tips on where to go. When we came into their warm apartment, we made a beeline to the bathroom to wash our hands. My friend had made a feast of apple pie, seven layer dip, pretzel cookies, shortbread. Emily and I brought massive Sicilian rice balls from the Italian market around the corner. Standing in the small deli waiting for service, I could feel my nerves getting jittery at how small the space was - a woman in front of us with her toddler, the toddler slapping palms on the display case. It would be the last time we went to this market. It would be the last time that we rang the doorbell and climbed the stairs to a friend’s apartment. My notebook is full of eager notes from that day: don’t miss the museum in Parma, Genoa, Luca, outside of Turin (hilly vineyards, great bed and breakfast), Puglia, the stone huts of Albarello. By then, the crisis in Italy was spreading. On my last day in the office in midtown, I stopped to talk to a coworker about how scared we were to be coming into work. Don’t look up what’s happening at the hospitals in Italy, she warned. You won’t be able to unsee it.
When we left my friend’s apartment that day, having laughed and eaten and imagined our honeymoon, I paused awkwardly in front of her in her kitchen, until we both shrugged and embraced. By then, we had been warned against hugs. It would be my last hug with someone who wasn’t Emily for the next twelve months.
If Leap Day doesn’t return for years, what is the anniversary of the last day we were so carefree? No one can unsee the last year. The unmitigated joy of our bridal shower is something I regard with gratitude and guilt. Thank goodness we celebrated when we did. For all those who will never get to celebrate.
xo,
c
p.s.
The writer Aminatou Sow’s newsletter is a gift, especially this one: “Homework: TheAudre Lorde Questionnaire to Oneself.”
On March 20th, the incredible R.O. Kwon is teaching a two hour seminar on writing personal essays for publication - you can sign up here.
Contact your local representative to ask what they’re doing to combat the alarming rise in Anti-Asian hate crimes.
I’ve been tuning in for daily Writers Hours, courtesy of the London Writers Salon, and highly recommend them if you want some community and accountability. (Hat tip to writer Jeanna Kadlec for cluing me in!)