Inviting my exes to my wedding feels like
creating a guest-list for the funeral of my youth,
a eulogy to all the love I will never have again,
condolence cards to the relationships that I failed,
or the ones that failed me.

Dear you, please send me your address
so I can extend an invitation to you, and your wife,
and your two lovely daughters, so we can join up in October
and celebrate this cherished day, and when softly, you brush my cheek
with your scraggly lip in congratulations we will not remember damp basement couches
or the gritty winter tromping snow-sodden through the woods and breaking
breaking breaking so many separate times for all the things we were too young
and scared to say out loud. Will most certainly not remember bodies melting into bodies
for all the cold that winter brought we were so hot, so hot, so hot.

Dear you, please send me your address,
because I can’t imagine getting by without your blessing.
You will be lost in every room.
I will likely find you playing the piano in the chapel attic, just as you did
at my uncle’s funeral, how “Sheeps May Safely Graze” bellowed out the rotten walls
and I, quaking out those broken notes of me felt so whole in your sounds.
But you will not be mine to find, and maybe you play for someone new.
You will be kind, will hold me just so long to be cautious and let me go
quickly enough to be painful. You will say all the right things in earnest, and what you won’t say
I will keep in treasured dresser drawers where all the trinkets of you still live with me in symbols.

Dear you, please send me your address,
because if you aren’t there, I will be looking for you the whole time,
will be scanning faces in the crowd of celebrating surveyors and oh, there you are, of course you came,
but how am I to feel if you, too, are celebrating? I fear that I, on such an occasion as this,
for you, would be in mourning. How is it fair to hurt so much for you and feel so much love
for this forever vow and in the cadence of this love I hope that you are also grieving the loss of us
as I have done so many times over, in imagining this very scene. What does that mean?
What ugly truths have lent themselves to me?
What would it look like to grab you from the crowd, to shake the breath from you
and beg you to remember all the nights you gripped me so thoughtlessly and drank
from me the depths of every fear and craving. How is it that we now pass like ships and
barely even nod? Do you remember all that endless quench and how you said always always yes
and I believed you? But one must not make scenes of former lovers at their weddings.

Dear you, please send me your address,
we were not so much in love as we were reckless with our bodies,
drunk on wine and dancing dancing in the endless nights of summer,
how I learned to shamelessly undress with your eyes so fixed, to be fierce and vulnerable at once,
to grip and fight and wrench as men had done to me so many times and how you opened up
that force in me, that hunger flesh and craze that girls keep hidden in their sheets, how you
devoured me and I matched you praying mantis and we engulfed ourselves in flame for just some weeks
and died by the light of our love-making. How do you
put a postage stamp on such a thing and call it “save the date”?

Dear you, and you and you and you. I hope you’ll come.
I am selfish. I know. I want to remember all the depths I’ve been down with
all of you. To get the bends and burst my vessels with the
punch of all of this exhausting love. There is too much to go around
and maybe this is why poets shouldn’t wed, but I don’t know how to be ready
to say good-bye to all the lives I haven’t had the chance to drink from yet.

Inviting my exes to my wedding feels like
saying goodbye to so many tiny deaths and letting
the ashes burn in the chaos of one symbolic day
then all the other days to come with your one
true someone, all the while knowing how often
someone’s come and gone. Perhaps it’s masochistic
to want you there in watching, so cruel perhaps to ask,
but I do want you at my wedding, and for this someone to last.
And in so doing, I will learn to let you go
in proof that I can be tethered to a vow,
but do not ask me if I still love you,
at least, please don’t ask me now.

12/27/2016

Posted on 12/27/2016
Copyright © 2024 Lauren Singer