"I'm sorry, I can't."
"I'm sorry, I can't."
"I'm sorry, I can't."
No matter how long I stared at the scribbled note, the meaning stayed the same. I held it up hoping, praying, that the sunlight would illuminate the other words that had been written in magic invisible ink.
But nothing appeared.
Just those four tiny little words...and yet, they had the power to bring my whole world crashing down around me in an instant. Splintering, shattering and exploding into a million little pieces. Yes, it was that dramatic!
I finally managed to pry my eyes from the note and found myself staring into the terrified faces of my two best friends. They looked very concerned. Like I was a ticking time bomb waiting to explode.
And they were right.
I was.
Tick. Tick.
I was teetering on the brink of insanity. I could feel it trying to suck me in like an all-consuming black hole. The tug was almost too hard to fight.
Did I even want to fight it?
But what would happen if I let go? I knew I was in shock right now, drenched in a sort of numb, detached feeling. But I could feel the other hostile emotions bubbling their way to the surface and fighting to take control.
I blinked. My eyes were stinging.
I tried to open my mouth and speak.
It was dry and nothing came out.
I looked at my best friend Sue, my rock; the one person I could always rely on for help.... Nothing. Not a word. Just horror.
I shifted my gaze to Val. She was the joker, the fun-loving rebel. She had the ability to turn even the most terrible situation into a laugh. Again...nothing. Just stupefied horror plastered across her now-ashen face.
I looked down at my shaking hands; they were crunching the corners of the note. My heart felt like it was going to break through the safe confines of my rib cage, taking my stomach and lungs with it.
And then I snapped. It overwhelmed me, rising up from the most primitive part of my soul where logic, rules and intellect wielded no power. This was a place of red, raw, uninhibited emotion.
And so I screamed at the top of my lungs until my voice went hoarse and my throat was raspy.
"Get me out of this dress. Get me out of it. Get it off!"
My desperate fingers franticly ripped at my wedding dress; a dress that had taken my two friends ten minutes to get me into, thanks to the intricate crisscross ribbons of the bodice. But I was trapped.
Sue and Val sprang into action, simultaneously grabbing at the stubborn ribbons, but it was taking too long. The air around me became too thick to breathe, and I felt like I was drowning.
"I can't breathe. I can't breathe. It's too tight."
Val made a move for the knife that had arrived earlier with the room service, and, without hesitation, she cut. The sound of the serrated knife eviscerating the ribbons was like fingernails down a blackboard; it made my skin crawl. But I could feel the bodice getting looser and looser, until it finally slipped down my aching body and pooled lifelessly on the floor.
I was finally free.
And then the tears came. Hot, wet, tears streaming down my cheeks and streaking my flushed skin with angry, black mascara lines. The tears turned to sobbing.
I looked at my dress, the pathetic puddle of ribbons, satin and beads lay at my feet. But I still felt trapped. My hair! The perfect updo, held together with delicate pearl clips. Suddenly, it felt like every strand of hair was tightening around my head, like a boa constrictor going in for the kill. My fingers ripped, desperately trying to free it from its pearly captives.
I wanted to get the pearl clips removed. Gone. Off. I wanted to rub every single trace of the wedding away.
I pulled out my earrings and grabbed the nearest tissue, rubbing my red lipstick off until my lips hurt. It smeared across my face like an ugly rash.
If someone were standing outside the window looking in, they would have pegged me for a crazy person. And I wouldn't have blamed them. Because somewhere in the back of my now-estranged rational brain, I knew I looked like a lunatic escaped from a mental asylum. But I didn't know what else to do....
Because he...
Michael Edwards—fiancé of one year, perfect boyfriend of two—had left me, Lilly Swanson, just ten minutes before I was scheduled to walk down the aisle. The bottle of perfume that he'd wanted me to wear today, insisted I wear, because "it was his favorite," mocked me from the dressing table. So I picked it up and threw it against the wall, watching it shatter into a million pieces, just like my life. I was hit by the sickly sweet smell of jasmine and felt sick to my stomach.
What was I going to tell the five-hundred guests who were sitting in the church waiting for me? Some had even flown here to South Africa all the way from Australia.
Hi everyone. Thanks for coming. Guess what? SURPRISE! No wedding!
A wedding that my father had spent a small fortune on.
A wedding that was going to be perfect.
Perfect, dammit. Perfect!
I'd made sure of that. I had painstakingly handled every single tiny detail. It had taken months and months of meticulous planning to create this day, and now what?
Things went very blurry all of a sudden. I vaguely remember my brother James bursting into the room, screaming insults and then vowing to kill him. He even punched the best man when he claimed to have no knowledge of Michael's whereabouts. My rational lawyer father tried to find a legitimate motive for Michael's behavior, insisting we speak to him before jumping to any rash conclusions. Hundreds of phone calls followed: where was he? Who had seen him? Where did he go?
At some stage the guests were told, and the rumor mill went into full swing...
He'd had an affair.
He'd eloped with someone else.
He was a criminal on the run.
He was gay.
He'd been beamed up by aliens and was being experimented on. (Hopefully it was painful.)
People threw around bad words like bastard, asshole and liar. They also threw around words like shame, sorry and pity. They wondered whether they should take their wedding gifts back, or leave them. What was the correct protocol in a situation like this?
While the world around me was going mad, I felt a strange calm descend. Nothing seemed real anymore, and I began to feel like a voyeur looking at my life from a distance. I didn't care that I was sitting on the floor in my bra and panties. I didn't care that my mascara and lipstick were so smudged I looked like Batman's Joker. I just didn't care.
Some minutes later my other brother Adam, the doctor, burst in and insisted I drink a Coke and swallow the little white pill he was forcing down my throat. It would calm me, he said.
Shortly after that, my overly dramatic, theater-actress mother rushed in to give the performance of her life.
"Why, why, why?" She placed her hand across her heart.
"What is this, a madness most discreet? A stench most foul?" She held her head and cried out, "Whyyy?!"
"For heaven's sake, Ida, this isn't some Shakespearean bloody play." I could hear the anger in my father's voice. Even after 18 years of divorce, they still couldn't be civil to each other.
"Lest I remind you that all the world is a stage." My mother shouted back, the deep timbre in her voice quivering for added dramatic tension as she tilted her head upward and clenched her jaw.
"There you go again with your crap! Clearly you still haven't learned to separate fantasy from reality!"
"Well, I managed to do that with our marriage!"
My brother jumped between them. "Stop it. This isn't the time!"
And then all pandemonium broke out.
The priest came around to offer some kind of spiritual guidance but exited quickly, and very red-faced, when he saw my state of undress. Some inquisitive relatives stuck their heads through the door, painted with sad, sorry puppy-dog looks, but they, too, left when they saw me spread-eagled on the floor. An enormous ruckus ensued when the photographer burst in and started talking photos of me—no one had told him. The ruckus became a total freak show when the "flamboyant" dress designer, who wanted to see his "best creation" come alive, saw the state of the dress.
Then everything went very hazy and the noises around me combined into one strange drone.
I closed my eyes and everything went black.