On Secretly Eloping at 22 Years Old
A non-fiction piece about getting kind-of-green-card-kind-of-for-real married.
Edith Beale*
*Name has been changed to a pseudonym for anonymity
A while back, there was a rumor going around that I, a baby-faced twenty-two-year-old, had secretly eloped, marrying some European I’d met on the internet less than a year prior. Whether for love or for a green card (no one spreading these rumors could ever agree), I had become fodder for the gossip mill; newsworthy. And because I love drama and a good story, I gave into my petty nature and refused to repute the whispers just because it was so awfully funny. Plus, when did a good rumor ever get stopped by something as fickle as the truth anyway?
If you did really want to know the truth, I was married on Monday, August 15th. I spent thirty-five minutes in City Hall, signed two pieces of paper and carried a bouquet of snapdragons. When the marriage certificates addressed to the pair of us arrived at my mother’s house—I was between apartments and needed somewhere to send them-I told her we had applied for a fishing license together. We’ve never gone fishing.
We sleep in the same bed but with two separate duvets. His is thinner than mine. Men tend to sweat in their sleep, and I don’t know if this is an issue of gender and body temperature or if I’m just drawn to chronically clammy, nightmare-ridden men. I fall asleep first, almost always before 10:00 p.m. We wake up in the middle of the night for no reason at all and kiss each other on the shoulders and the lips when the light is blue and grainy before falling back asleep and having sex dreams about each other. Our parents don’t know we’re married. They don’t need to.
I don’t think marriage means anything at all. That’s not true. What I think is that the act of getting legally married—the paperwork and the tax filings and the government contract—are wholly unrelated to the practice of love. I married without the promise of forever or ‘til death do us part, with an understanding that because we believe in open borders and larger paychecks, we had promised each other a platonic and logistical commitment before a romantic one. I didn’t sign a prenup, which was probably very stupid, but I’m not the one whose childhood photos prominently feature suit uniforms embroidered with the name of one very expensive all-boys prep school on them.
There’s nothing funnier than being married—it’s awfully convenient at the airport (“my husband has been waiting to check his bags for the last half an hour!”) and at the bar (“I think I have to go home early—the old ball and chain, you know!”). It’s also hilarious to have in-laws, especially in-laws that don’t know they’re your in-laws. I always wonder why I do not hear more giggling in the world. We are always giggling, in the grocery store and on the train and at the movies. I laugh the same way with my closest friends, which is to say loudly and often. We sit on the couch and hold each other and watch old sitcoms, and I kiss my own wrist three times, thinking it is his before noticing because I have forgotten where my body ends and his begins.
I cry when Frances McDormand and Zooey Deschanel hug at the end of Almost Famous. I cry when the cat smiles while he sleeps, curled up into a perfect blond croissant. I cry when I hear Bob Dylan songs. I don’t cry when my mother tells me she thinks I look fat and ugly. I don’t cry when I open another email that begins with “We regret to inform you…” I don’t cry on my wedding day, but I do cry two months later when he brings me a cup of Lapsang Souchong tea as I wake up.
I am soppy and romantic and deeply cynical and guarded. I know that every molecule of love I feel will become ten gallons of heartbreak if our relationship ever sours, and nonetheless I am twice as in love as I was the day before. I think I have run out of places to store all this love, and yet I always find more, under the couch cushions and behind the coat rack and in the undusted corners of the spice cabinet.
“The reason--” I say, as we wait to check out in the hardware store, “that all these people are always getting divorced, it’s because they marry the wrong person.” He laughs and then looks up and nods solemnly. “Me? I married my best friend. I mean, who else would I want to spend the rest of my life with?”
We spent the rest of the afternoon trying to attach lightbulbs to the loose wires hanging from our ceiling. We wire three light bulbs, one in the living room, one in the bathroom, one in the bedroom. We spent money we didn’t have to get those smart light bulbs, the ones you can control from your phone, where you can change the color and the brightness from anywhere. When they’re done though, we bask under those LED lights as if it were the August sun. The next day, he goes to the grocery store to get ingredients for dinner: zucchini, smoked tofu, bucatini. I sit on the couch and watch the big ceiling light turn off, then on again, then off, then on again, then off, then on again. It’s not faulty wiring or bad installation; I know what that means. I send him a text:
I love you, too.
