wedding

I'd never wanted a wedding either. I turned the purple ring around my finger, the diamond lay on the ground. I should have let the ring determine the style of my wedding, life, and marriage. Popular opinion dissuaded me and I created the wedding of their dreams.

It had been beautiful. At everyone's request, we postponed the wedding over a year. It will be better, we concluded after listening to every opinion and not our hearts, to wait. We'll be financially stable, in college, our parents will have had time to accept the marriage; apparently true love waits.

Except the entire wedding was a performance. Instead of a declaration of devotion and love, we had danced the game in a gown and tux, our strings guided by the audience and the minister. We lit the candles, read the poems, cut the cake, played the classic romantic songs, all for the approval of smiles on faces we would never see again. We had seen our families and my maid of honor since that day. I could barely even remember who else showed up. There pictures were nowhere on display, their gifts long broken, returned, or donated.

I kept the amethyst on my left hand, slipping the diamond onto my right.