I answered, one hand on the wheel, the wind blasting my face. My phone rang as I barreled down the hill from work, car windows down, smoking my second cigarette of the day (because I had started smoking again in those months of gut-wrenching anxiety leading up to my wedding). That day before I embarked on my wedding trip, she and I kept missing each other.
My fiancé even knew that part of it, jokingly referring to her as my “boyfriend.” I appreciated many things about her, and she me, especially how we were total opposites. Soon we were eating Thai food and discussing films and plans with our partners, all of it creating a friendship of years. Years earlier, when we were both new to the organization, she sat down in my office and we instantly began talking about our mothers. The night before the trek out to the Mojave Desert, I had a funny exchange with a friend from work, a lesbian in a long-term relationship.
And there was my soon-to-be husband and his vintage tuxedo, waiting to marry me.
Regardless of superstition or omen, here were my friends, who had come from all points on the United States map, and there was my dress and my new brown cowboy boots. What I overlooked was that the date was in the middle of Mercury retrograde, supposedly the time of year when one should avoid signing contracts or making life-altering decisions because of the potent possibility of reversal. I would be 33, an auspicious age to begin a new life. It was early March: I had chosen this day months before for its full moon, enchanted by the notion that it would also be a full lunar eclipse. There was another omen I decided to overlook. Yet I still needed to gather lilies, daisies and roses from the local grocery stores, shower, get into my orange mail-order dress, and put on my tiger’s-eye earrings before I went and got hitched. Ours would not be a traditional Mexican-American wedding we couldn’t afford mariachis, for one. A righteous hangover seemed ominous, but there was no time to contemplate this. My feet were sore from dancing on the wood floor of a bar the night before. Not only was my head on a strange pillow, it also housed a terrible rhythmic pounding. I WOKE up with my head on an unfamiliar pillow in a bungalow in the high desert of California, 140 miles from my dilapidated apartment in the Koreatown section of Los Angeles.
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