11.27

[not Catherine. Sometimes I feel like I have no idea why or what is happening in that story. I have no idea how to pace a novel]

I just laughed with him. Not five minutes ago. I can prove it; people took pictures. It was a big to-do. It's not every day someone gets engaged. Of course.
See, she didn't know about it. Most people didn't. He invited all of his and her closest friends to a party. He didn't bother saying what for, just that nobody would want to miss it for any reason. But it was supposed to be a surprise for her, or else she might get suspicious. And when she's suspicious, that's basically the worst (she doesn't let go of a thing once she's gotten curious about it). All he said was that it was a surprise, so we didn't tell a living soul.
We all trucked it down to her park. Not hers, strictly speaking, but the park where, if you walk to the right spot on the cliff, you can hold hands with your woman and watch the sun go down in the valley until the last fingers of twilight are the only things illuminating your mad dash back to the car, and this all with laughing about the jokes you told and the things you saw and the kiss you're waiting for at the door of the car (the parking lot is fully black now; you've planned it exactly, and no one can see you as she pulls you against her and you back her against the car and you kiss so log and do sweet that when you break free, you wish you could repeat it, but of course night has settled at that exact moment and heaved its heavy sigh and folded its blackness down across the world. Forgive my indiscretion. All you need to know is that it had been her favorite park since she realized that she could have them, and preferences weren't limited to others.
She must have arrived more than a half and hour ago. Of course, we'd all arrived early--that's me, Cindy and Sherri, Dan, Elena, Tristan and Desiree, and, of course, Marcel. So we all stood around, kind of, waiting. It was a good kind of waiting: the kind where time doesn't seem to pass, but when everybody quiets down again, you realize that it's time to go again and all the waiting you've done has paid off and you can just continue on with your life. It's a good kind of waiting: the kind people wait their entire lives to have to do. Pleasant waiting. It's a novel concept.
She arrived, and when she came through the woods down the path, she had exactly that radiance which poets try so hard to capture but never can quite, and now I'm tempted to make a run at it just to see if I can explain how the sunlight filtered through the dying woods cut all the darkness from the light and left only golden, reddish glory to slash down to her face and gather there in her golden curls. She smiled and it made her cheeks blush the red of the sugar maples behind her. Her hair swayed with every step and flashed the gold of the oaks above. She was not a part of the woods; she was the woods, and when I realized it it tore a tiny hole in me that's been leaking ever since.
Strictly speaking, we didn't know what was going on, but we figured it out sooner than she did. And even so, people closest to the hurricane are least likely to see the size of it. So it's not like she's stupid.
Marcel pulled out his guitar and sang a song to her that another man wrote.
He used the words of a better man, an artist from a different age who had to search his soul for his words, who reached for his guitar when things were bad and when things were good and when things were just okay. He took the words of a man who had no advantages (no Internet, no predecessors, no collaborators) and used them to succinctly summarize his own feelings. It felt like uprooting and moving a sequoia to show New Yorkers how important the trees are. It felt like stealing money from a man to buy gifts for his wife. It felt like stabbing a man so you could do a good deed by driving him to the hospital. It felt like giving her another man's heart. But nobody else saw it, and if they saw it, they didn't care, and if they cared, they new better than to feel. I was the fool and felt. And it felt horrible.
I cried. It helped that everyone else was crying too, if for different reasons. I could at least imagine they all felt the same pain I did.
Marcel got down on one knee and asked her "D, will you marry me?"
She didn't even pause to consider her options.

So yes, I laughed with him. I smiled and laughed and clapped and cried, not five minutes ago, as my best friend asked my ex-girlfriend to marry him.

I'll tell you when it stops hurting.

Don't expect a call from me anytime soon.