What a spread they have laid out for me. They call it a reception, but they have simply built a warm, damp room and filled it with sugar, and I could not have asked for a kinder invitation.
Consider the cake. Three tiers, white and soft, sweating gently under the lights, its buttercream a landscape of sealed seams I already know the map of. They will slice it, and photograph the slicing, and leave the rest under a glass dome overnight, thinking a dome is a wall. A dome is a greenhouse.
By the second morning I will have found the moist crumb at the base, where the frosting meets the plate, and begun the quiet work of turning celebration back into soil.
I love how hard they try to keep this day. The flowers, cut from their roots and stood in water so they will not know yet that they have already left. The gown, folded into a box with little sachets to keep me out, as if a folded thing in a dark closet is anything but a promise.
The dance floor, the spilled champagne soaking warm into the wood beneath the boards, sugar and damp meeting in the dark where no one will wipe.
They preserve the top tier in the freezer for their first anniversary. A whole year, they say, and then they will eat it and remember. I admire this. I am patient too. Cold only slows me; it does not change my mind.
Everything they gathered here to make permanent, the cake, the petals, the wooden chairs, the vows written on paper: all of it, in the end, is coming home to me. I am simply the last guest to leave.
I never leave.