How to Say I Do

by Tal Bauer

I couldn’t get enough. “Noël, Noël,” I chanted. I love you. No, don’t say it yet. I wanted to tell him somewhere else.

When we were sitting beneath the shade of an oak in my yard, at the picnic table I’d built with my bare hands, with a candle between us and a glass of wine caught between our fingers. Lord, I saw it all so beautifully. His smile beneath the open sky, the gleam in his eyes after a Texas sunset.

Noël made a noise, something like a grunt that was part pain, part disbelief. I understood—how could this ever end? Well, it wouldn’t. We’d carry on and bring this home with us. This wasn’t the end. It was our beginning.

Later, I remembered the way Noël stilled after I spoke, how every piece and part of him turned to glass. Later. I didn’t see it then. I didn’t feel it. No, right then I barreled on, kissing his palm and nuzzling his wrist.

“And you gotta come to Texas. I want to show you everything. I want to see your face when you taste one of my grapes for the first time. I want to pour you a glass of my dad’s petite sirah, and I want to take you all the way out to the back pasture where I first saw a shooting star.” I was dizzy with everything I wanted, my dreams trying to paint themselves in my mind all at once. Noël rested his fingers over my lips.

Those reveries cradled me past dawn, but when I woke, I was alone. Alone-alone, in the stillness of an empty place. No light peeked out from under the crack of the bathroom door. There was no figure on the balcony silhouetted by the sun.

I didn’t want to read it. I didn’t want to see it, or realize what it meant to wake up alone and see words scrawled on a half-sheet of paper. I reached for it, and— Wyatt, I’m sorry.

Yesterday, I’d thought everything was spun gold, that my long-buried dreams were coming true, and that held hands and sweet kisses led to magic and happy endings. Now, as I stared out of the cold windows of my room, I spotted the discordant spaces.

I watched a single drop of water make a slow run from the top of a pane to the bottom, and I felt like I was fracturing somewhere critical and irreparable. Noël was gone.

We’d had a moment. One week. One wild, insane, indescribable, indefinable week. A week removed from time, cut off from the world. A pocket paradise, somewhere with no rules and no consequences, no past and no future. We’d had a hedonistic, immediate, rushing moment. That’s all.

I’ll come see you in New York. For a moment, half of a second, I’d thought, Yes, yes, this is— No. No, what was I thinking? I couldn’t come back from my failed honeymoon with a new love of my life.

I’d pulled a classic—no, the classic: run away after a public dumping, pour yourself into an airplane, and then melt into a sunshine oasis and a new pair of arms and legs. Thousands of people had the same story. Broken hearts and bedroom romps, horizontal heart-mending to speed up the healing process. I wasn’t special. I’d hooked up. So what?

There were literally one million reasons why I couldn’t be with Wyatt. Timing, location, distance. He lived in Texas, I lived in Manhatta...

My thoughts were as relentless as an undertow, clawing me out into dark waters, and I kept running aground on memories of Wyatt. Him and me dancing in dying candlelight after the wedding. Him and me hand in hand beneath the waves, eyeing coral and schools of fish, his arm wrapped around my waist. Him and me sharing a glass of wine. Him and me making love.

I still had his ring. I couldn’t take it off. I couldn’t even try to. What now? What the fuck now? I’d carved a week out of time to press Pause on my pain, but how well had that turned out? After all this, had my heart broken once, or twice?

I'd even fallen for Wyatt, and I'd imagined, for a moment, that he could fall for me, too. But he couldn’t. Because the truth was, no matter how much I wanted—wanted to turn the plane around, wanted to parachute from the back, wanted to call Wyatt on a phone I didn’t have, to a number I didn’t know, because we had given each other everything except our phone numbers—there was this: everyone I’d ever loved had left me.

coworkers had told me one night, drunk off her ass and airing out her many complaints. You’re a lot, Noël. I knew that. Everybody who ever met me knew that.

Didn’t Wyatt remember meeting me a week ago when I’d been dumped and thrown away? There was a reason for that. Surely he had to understand he was scooping up someone else’s trash.

So what was going to be different about Wyatt if he and I tried for something after this week? Nothing. Nothing would be different. We’d end up like everyone else, with him eventually worn thin by how me I was. I’d be such an unimaginable disappointment to him in the end, and he’d wonder why on Earth he didn’t see, from the very beginning, how we would end so pathetically. He’d remember that, when we began, I was a useless wreck falling on him in the back row of an airplane on my failed honeymoon.

Leaving now would save Wyatt. Save his squandered time and his wasted efforts. Save him, too, from the pointlessness of us even being together.

This, as unbearable and excruciating as it was, was better than what I knew was coming. It was better to leave things as they were. A dream. A mirage. I’d leaped, and I’d soared, but this was the cras...

My stomach hurled. I had nothing left, but dry heaves wracked me until I was limp, and I laid panting on the rubber floor with my eyes clenched shut and my hand over my mouth, trying to hold back my sobs. I couldn’t be w...

His voice, low and sweet when he sang, his lips at my ear and the sand between our toes. I could still smell him. I could still feel him. His hands on me, him inside of me.

Enough. Enough, it’s over. You left. My inner voice was vicious. You left. For Wyatt’s own good, a part of me whispered.

What about this—this apartment, this cash-paid studio stuffed with pot ash, my invasive work, my complete lack of any life outside of one-hundred-hour workweeks—or, fuck, me, my life, or my existence at all would Wyatt find irresistible? What part of my real life could I offer him that he’d fall in love with? The Noël I’d been in Mexico was… Well, someone I wished I could be. But me? Real me, real Noël?

Time alone, time to think, time to remember. No thanks. The very last thing I wanted was to remember the sunshine and soft waves and Wyatt’s smile.

Not of Jenna, but of Wyatt. Of beaches and midnights and slow smiles, and someone who had wanted to put a ring on my hand, even if it was only a tourist trinket, even if it was only for two days. He’d wanted me, he’d honestly wanted me, at least for a little bit. Wasn’t it just a sign, a giant Times Square sign, that I was here, maudlin and morose over Wyatt when I was supposed to be broken-hearted over Jenna?

“Honey,” he said. “If you want to find love?” He raised our clasped hands in front of our faces. If you want to find love, his name starts with Wyatt. You’ve got to turn around. You know you missed the boat, or plane, in this case. You fucked up, you already fucked up—

I kept turning it all over in my mind. Where did I go wrong? What did I do that pushed him away? What was the moment, the thing that I said or did that made everything collapse? If I understood it, and I relived the moment where I fucked it all up, maybe I could…

What? Go back in time? Replay the week somehow and not say or do whatever it was that made Noël leave me in the middle of the night? No, there were no do-overs in life. I’d had one week with Noël, and that was it.

I remembered him and me in the lagoon that first day, and thought about the something that had drawn us together.

At least, I’d thought something had been drawing us together. I’d thought there had been a mutual pull. Him sitting on his back deck and waiting for me to walk up the beach, him falling asleep against my chest after finger painting the stars, him kissing me… I thought that it all meant he wanted where we were heading just as much as I did.

I thought a man didn’t make love the way we did unless he believed it meant something. But what did I really know? Noël was the only man I’d ever made love to. Disillusioned. That was a word for what I was feeling. Spent...

Even so, this was my life, and I wished Noël had wanted to see it. I wished he’d believed there was something worthwhile here, something to visit and explore and maybe find delightful or charming.

It’s one thing to chase your own dreams for your entire life. It’s another thing entirely to have someone else be beguiled with what you’ve created. Noël’s absence, as unfair as my contemplations had turned, felt like a reprimand.

It was that time of day when I sat and thought about Noël’s smile. I should have put all these memories away, but I didn’t want to yet. Not yet. Not when I could still hear his laugh sometimes on the breeze, or when I swore I felt his fingertips running along the outside of my thigh when I was groggy and trying to wake up in the morning.

No, I wasn’t in the mood to be cheered up yet. I needed another night of solitude and time with my memories. And with Noël.

This house was filled with ghosts and broken dreams, so what was one more night, or one more lonely stretch of hours? I settled in, remembering the arc of his throat when he’d thrown back his head and laughed, and how I thought, with him, that all my long-lost hopes were finally coming true.

If my thoughts drifted at all toward Wyatt, I was fucked. I was drowning in sorrows over the loss of a love life I hadn’t led, spiraling into a vortex of might-have-beens and if-onlys.

I constantly relived the six days I’d shared with Wyatt and then propelled those memories forward, imagining a future so intricately detailed and vivid it was like I’d lived it. I missed that future, and I wanted it back, even though I’d never had it to begin with.

Every night, I dreamed that I saw his smile as soon as I opened my eyes, and then, when I woke up, I screamed into my pillow when I realized he’d never smile at me again. I made love to him, too, in my dreams, and, I swear, it was like he was...

I started working the late-night party circuit, and didn’t go back to my shitty studio until after three a.m. I hoped exhaustion would beat Wyatt’s memory out of me, but, without fail, I was awake by five, shivering through another dream with Wyatt’s voice in my ear. I couldn’t escape.

I remembered the feel of his stubble against my belly. I remembered cupping my hand around his cheek. I remembered kissing him for the very first time.

Now I’d run from Wyatt, but the thought of someone else, a new Wyatt, someone to get me over him— The first time I imagined it, I vomited.

Dear Wyatt, I don’t know how to move on. I wasn’t supposed to fall for you. Why, why did you save me? This is worse now, so much worse, than it would have been if I’d just been blitzed and miserable for a week in Mexico. I got over Jenna, but I can’t get over you, and now I’m fucking miserable all the time—

Dear Wyatt, I wish I’d never left you— Dear Wyatt, I wish I’d never met you— Dear Wyatt, I can’t do this without you—

The world was precarious. I was unmoored. I’d wake up sobbing. I’d wake up gasping. I’d wake up with Wyat...

But that was fine. I didn’t want to be social. I didn’t want to get back out there, or find someone, or turn it all around.

And if I was lucky, when the planes on departure out of JFK passed overhead, I could imagine they were stars twinkling down on Wyatt and me, and that he was really there, just a hand’s reach away, and I hadn’t actually fucked up the best thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life. Dear Wyatt—

I had the feel of him embedded in my fingertips, still, and his laugh lived inside my bones— And then, the morning that I’d woken alone, without him, with only his note.