The Wedding People

by Alison Espach

Every time she ordered flowers or sampled another piece of cake or told her friends how happy she was, she got this horrible feeling that she was bragging.

There is no such thing as a happy place. Because when you are happy, everywhere is a happy place. And when you are sad, everywhere is a sad place.

“I just mean, a story can be beautiful not because of the way it ends. But because of the way it’s written.”

It’s three a.m. The grief hour, according to Phoebe’s therapist. The demon hour, according to medieval peasants. The hour that you wake up when you have excess cortisol in your body, according to a doctor Phoebe once saw.

Phoebe was the only person waiting in the dark to condemn herself for every single thing when the day was over.

And maybe they are all lonely. Maybe this is just what it means to be a person. To constantly reckon with being a single being in one body. Maybe everybody sits up at night and creates arguments in their head for why they are the loneliest person in the world.

It is so easy to hate Mrs. Dalloway for worrying so much about her stupid party, the way it’s so easy to hate the bride, she thinks. But in the end, everybody goes to the party and that’s the point. It’s Mrs. Dalloway who brings them all together in a modern world full of railroads and wars and illnesses that are always tearing people apart. If the problem is loneliness, then in this way, and maybe in only this way, Mrs. Dalloway is the hero for giving everybody a place to be.

“Your husband is not going to take care of you the way you think,” Phoebe says. “Nobody can take care of you the way you need to take care of yourself. It’s your job to take care of yourself like that.”

And maybe that’s it: You do things in the moment for the person you hope you might be two years from now. You don’t kill yourself when you are sad because one day you might not be sad,

It is so much easier to sit in things and wait for something to save us.

becoming who you want to be is just like anything else. It takes practice. It requires belief that one day, you’ll wake up and be a natural at it.