29: the distance

It really don't matter if this guy opens my head, either. 'Cause all I wanna do is go the distance.  -Rocky Balboa

The other day, I received a wedding card and a check to help us start our life together. I went to the bank, ready to cash the check and add it to our post-wedding fund envelop. I pulled up to the bank. I put the check and my driver's license in the tube. I said, "Cash, please."

The woman's smiling teeth, her horse mouth distorted by the small camera that put her on the television next to the tube. "We need both signatures," she said. If it had said "or," she explained, things would be different. "But it's that 'and' in there."

Megan Veit and Robert Betz.

I nod to the woman. Yes, I understand that these things are supposed to be done together. We're supposed to be moving through these growing rapids together–navigating.

Lately, the water's been rushing and whipping over my head. I'm drowning.

This has not made me the easiest person to live with. To talk to on the phone at night. It has not made it easy to eat. It has made it easy to buy cookies "for the family to share," and snack on them throughout the day when no one seems to be looking.

This isn't the story we thought we'd be telling, and now that we're less than a month away all we can do is wait and hope my sanity goes the distance. Now, I worry that this anxiety has already marred our wedding memories. I worry that my increased sensitivity and unbelievable sadness at times will be what we look back on when we think of the time leading up to our wedding.

It took twelve years after a dog attacked me to look in the mirror and not examine the scars–make a fish face and see the tissue pucker, watch the constellation of puncture wounds turn white when surrounded my sunburn. Will it take twelve years to be look back on this?

I leave Sunday, will pull into St. Louis when half are celebrating a World Cup victory and half are drowning their loss in another pint. Things will be different, always are when the states between us are removed–which says good things about the two weeks leading up to the wedding.

He'll be in Wapak, pulling in when things are in order to say, "See, that was simple! We're happy." He'll be right, in a way. And we'll be happy.