Chapter 2 — The Invitation
The invitation to Whitney’s wedding arrived in an envelope so heavy it felt like a small legal document.
Gold ink, hand-torn edges, a wax seal the color of dried blood.
Inside, in calligraphy that must have cost more than my monthly grocery budget, it requested the honor of my presence at the marriage of Whitney to a man named Ryan, at a venue whose name I recognized from a magazine as the place local celebrities got married.
I sat with it at my kitchen table for a long time.
By then I was twenty-nine and I had built, quietly and without anyone in my family particularly noticing, a life I was proud of.
I had a job I was good at, a small apartment that was entirely mine, and a handful of friends who had taught me — slowly, patiently, over years — that being easy to overlook was not the same thing as being unimportant.
I had spent a lot of money I didn’t really have on a therapist who helped me understand that the voice in my head telling me to shrink was not my voice.
It was my mother’s.
It had just been living in my head so long I’d mistaken it for the landlord.
So the question the invitation posed wasn’t really “will you attend your sister’s wedding.”
It was “will you walk back into the room that taught you to disappear, knowing what you now know.”
And for a while I honestly wasn’t sure.
I went in the end for a reason I’m not proud of and not ashamed of either: hope.
A stubborn, foolish, animal hope that people can change.
That maybe a wedding — an event about love, about family, about beginnings — might be the one occasion on which Whitney and my mother would look at me and see a sister and a daughter instead of an inconvenience with a pulse.
I knew it was unlikely.
I went anyway, because I had decided some time ago that I would rather be occasionally disappointed than permanently closed, and because a part of me wanted to be able to say, whatever happened next, that I had shown up.
That I had offered them the chance.