The Garter

Our wedding day was seventeen years ago today. I tried not to remember, but memory has a way of taking everything in my life and tossing it aside like an old shoe. What is my life worth anyways, now that she is gone?

I would have drunk myself dead by now, had it not been the way she died. Night after night I lay in the bed that would have been ours, wishing it had been me instead. Two hours before our wedding, I didn't think anything could go wrong. Five minutes later, I wondered if anything would ever be right again.

She'd forgotten the garter. She called and told me she was going back to pick it up, along with a few other things. I let her go. She was on her way back to the church when her car was obliterated by a Chevy truck. The driver inside was drunk, and only his drunkenness kept him from getting up and walking away from the accident, unharmed.

Now the garter lies on my nightstand, a constant reminder. It tears at my mind until I want to fling it from my window, as far as it can fly. But I can't, for it's the last remnant of her. A drop of blood stains one edge of the lacy object. Her blood. None of his was spilled. If it had been my choice, his would have been shed, all over his truck.

When I wake up in the morning, I look at her garter, blue ribbon winding through the middle. I asked her why, before that day. “Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue” was what she said back to me. Now I wish that I could borrow the old time back, make something new happen. Put my body in her car. Change things.

The garter haunts me. Sometimes when I wake up in the middle of the night, I think I see her in the moonlight, smiling at me, holding the garter in the air and laughing like the sunlight. She's wearing her wedding dress, the one I never got to see her in.

I wonder if it's better to remember everything, or to forget everything. It seems that it would be easier to just forget my life before, and move on. Make the garter disappear. But then again, it would be empty, without her presence, her once-existence, in my life. I can't forget her eyes, her smile, her laugh. They are woven into my being.

The garter still sits on my nightstand, trapping me in old memories and keeping me from starting over. Maybe someday I'll try again, let the garter fall away into my past along with my wedding day. But maybe I won't. Escape is easier said than done.