danyel's wedding
Already : Hatachi Archives
danyel's wedding Monday July 11
song: the eagles - desperado
mood: like a long time ago
i received an invitation in may for danyel's wedding. i didn't even know she was engaged; since about junior year, i haven't seen that much of her. i simply knew she was dating a guy from iowa that she met in rockford.
my inital feeling was one of obligation. certainly, i wanted to see danyel and her family, but i felt that this ceremony was irrelevant to the life that i now lead, and that it would simply be a 'token' wedding appearance. you know what i'm talking about when i say 'token'; we've all done that "i'm just going to go and show my face and support and then that will be that".
but that's not how it turned out, and i'm very pleased that i went.
i was the only ex-boyfriend invited to the wedding; i don't think that that merits some sort of medal, but rather, it highlights that danyel and i's relationship (in the strictest sense of the word) is no more than a memory of the past, and that no one felt threatened by my presence. it's not hard to write off three years in middle school and high school. but that's not where our relationship really ended; it only changed.
danyel and i have known each other for eleven years. she hated me, or at least, as well as any seventh-grader could, she loved me, at least, as well as any eighth-grader could. i supported her the best i could throughout her brace days, and i was there when she was dripping morphine to ease the pain of the freshly-installed metal rods in her back (scoliosis, for those of you who aren't familiar).
she watched me suffer the pain of gina; i watched her rebound on nick. at uiuc, she committed to someone who wasn't for her; i committed to no one, even the people that were for me. we've watched each other change and grow quite a bit.
yet, all of that changed in the past few years. both of us were distant; not by choice, but simply by circumstance. failing to have her in my life failed to remind me that i wanted her there, and the supportive roles she may have filled were simply taken up by new understudies. not that this is all bad -- i have made many new friends.
when i watched her walk down the aisle, literally, i realized that i wasn't happy with the current circumstances. how could someone who i know so well, whose family i know so well, be so ready to make such a huge decision in her life and i know nothing about it?
i told her at the reception that i was disappointed with the way things had been, and that i will make an effort to come by her apartment before i leave for japan. i will make an effort to meet and befriend her husband, because if he's that important to her, then he's that important to me.
so, about the song. i totally had a zen moment when i got in the car with sara to come back down to champaign. i was feeling all good about the wedding, and sara popped in a mix cd that malia made for her. the first track was the eagles off of 'hell freezes over': the very CD that i listened to essentially non-stop when i met danyel in seventh grade. i think i even made her a mix tape that had some of that stuff on there.
that's one downside to being closer to her again. she could tell story after embarassing story to my future girlfriend slash wife, and even back it up with pictures. oh, to be 12 again.
or not.
