Getting Married in My High School Auditorium

It’s the carpet that gives me pause.

The carpet looks thatched and nubby, but standing here staring at the floor—holding your hand, listening to the Assistant Principal/Events Director enthuse over removing the seats to lay out a parquet dance floor—I know the carpet is actually smooth to the touch, for it is the exact same carpet from my days here as a student, and I have felt it against my knees and shins and palms and cheeks and know full well that its complicated woven texture is an illusion, know it was already worn to a silk sheen twenty years ago, know it should be torn up and replaced entirely.

How much spilled SoBe and Snapple, how much Absolut dribbled from a concealed flask, how many dollops of Ponds Cold Cream, how many drops of paint from set-building or greenhouse dew from the PTO’s Valentines Day flower sale—held year after year until someone finally realized that handing dripping carnations only to couples and crushes and not every horny, fragile soul in the building might bruise some feelings, might break some hearts, might convince some of those souls that settling for something much less than love might not be so bad if its petals are still soft and bright and moist—how much of that is in the carpet?

“The student jazz band fits perfectly on stage, we’d throw them in for free,” the Assistant Principal/Events Director/Wedding Coordinator is saying, and you’re nodding, nodding, doing a different kind of math than the calculations I’m running.

“It seems perfect,” you say to me, “since you’re still such a ‘theater kid’ and all.”

It’s not your high school, it’s not your constellation of memories scattered and stained into the carpet behind the back rows, it’s not your good-girl act, it’s not your mask of placid tolerance for the cost-efficient whimsy of returning to what you don’t even realize is the scene of the crime, it’s not you tap-dancing away, playing this ill-cast role, knowing full well that if you keep playing it, you’ll have to play it forever, until the lights finally go out and the curtain sweeps shut and you listen for anything out there in the dark that could be the sound of applause.