A dream from 2015 that resonates well into 2020.
Rafael Trelles, Exodo II (2000). Oil on Canvas. Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico Collection.
There was a sharp chill in the room, even though summer had not quite faded into autumn yet. The stone walls were the main charm of the place but they also made it feel chilly, like a cellar. She stood under the heavy, wooden beams holding up the ceiling and tried to fix her underwear without too many people noticing. The peach slip dress she wore showed every crease, bump and line beneath it. She should've gone commando.
People were starting to gather, it was a festive atmosphere. She had arrived here with her friends from grad school, not knowing why or what they were doing there. At first, as they all sat around a communal table, she thought that this may be a meeting of the film class she was taking. But then the table was gone and in came a three-piece wedding band, a bride and a groom, strangers to the people that were now all seated in neat rows, facing the small stage on which the couple and a robed priest were standing.
Everyone looked slightly more well-dressed, just a bit more formally attired than she had initially observed. The woman sitting next to her was wearing a pink feathered fascinator. As she smoothed the peach fabric that had gathered around her hips, she stared intently at her hands. They were perfectly manicured with a slightly pink, natural-looking varnish. Adorning her right wrist was a delicate bracelet that sparkled as if it were made of diamonds.
She felt a sense of urgency, a lightning rod ripping through her stomach. A clock she hadn't noticed before on the wall opposite her showed the time was 2:00 pm. Two hours to go, she thought, but for what, she wasn't sure.
When she looked around the room again, she saw the familiar face of a friend, who was milling around talking to a peculiar combination of people; peculiar because they had never been in the same room as each other. They were all drawn from different parts of her life: There was her aunt, who must have gotten there some time between the wedding band dismantling and her noticing her manicured nails, because she couldn’t have missed her otherwise; her father, dressed in a navy blue suit she recognized as his best; her high school friend with whom she'd spoken to less and less over the years but for whom she still had a deep affection.
What are you doing here? someone said to her, but by the time she turned around to see who that person was they were lost in the crowd that kept growing, bulging against the cold, stone walls of the cellar-like house.
She then became immediately certain about the nature of the event she was present at. It neither dawned on her nor crept up on her. She was certain, as if she'd always been, as if she'd come from somewhere else—a hotel room where people, herself included, were 'getting ready'—for just a brief amount of time, to check on something, before she would have to come again, for the real deal, in two hours time.
Two hours to go.
By 2:00 pm the room would be arranged exactly as it had been on the floor plans she had scoured over with her mother for months now, the timing of the whole event would go according to the schedule she had pored over many a sleepless night; and she would, by the end of it, be a changed person, at least in the eyes of the law.
Her wedding.
It was her wedding day, and she was there to check on something. But most importantly she was there to have a final coffee with her film class friends—in the way you might have lunch or coffee with someone hours before you perform on stage—before she got married.