Perhaps it’s Taylor Swift and the tortured poets. Emotion is on the menu. There’s Taylor. There was the wedding of Baby Chicken and then there’s an Instagram of an older couple dancing in a square in Italy. It’s the couple dancing that elicits tears. Havisham Days are upon us.
Not in the know? Miss Havisham, a Dickens creation, is a ghost of her former self. Her lover jilted her at the altar. Mine dropped dead in front of me on a 4th of July weekend getaway. She wanders the remainder of her life in her wedding dress. This girl takes a couple of weeks mid-summer to become a widow in full, snot-covered face, eyes puffed shut with tears. The mumbling while moving about the house is the same, regardless of century.
The comparison became clear a few years back and thus the renaming of America’s Independence to Havisham Days. And in my home, it shall forever be so. I wander the halls dropping tissues willy-nilly hugging the cat while he squirms to be rid of my non-showered body. I have also been known in my grief to weep while simultaneously ingesting a few, or a hundred, cookies.
Havisham lived out her days in her smelly old wedding gown. Until she lit the disgusting thing, and herself, ablaze getting too near the fireplace. Ruining a dress is way too much for this girl but the tears, I imagine, are the same.
I have not cried over The Norwegian in a while. I don’t know that I cried enough at the time. I did not cry at the funeral. I did not take to my bed. They say grief is for those who can afford it. At the time, I could not afford it. Now, years later, I feel the abyss. The grief hole calls.
Someone catches a long-married couple dancing in a public square in Italy and I am reduced to tiny inconsolable child. I didn’t yearn for a room of one’s own. I wasn’t stifled in my marriage. I loved my brand of fairy tale. I don’t want a partner. I want that partner, that husband, that father of my children, that man who knew my secrets, and that man, more outgoing than I, who would have danced in the streets of Italy.
The Duchess Diaries 