Hello, hello all.
I was supposed to write page 200 of my memoir for an honors colloquium class. I decided to write a little piece called, "The Pink Cupcake Dress" and I decided I would share (because I haven't posted much lately.)
I stared at the stranger in the mirror. She looked approximately 24-years old, but her clothes and hair suggested a different age—an age of Barbie outfits, tea parties, and Cabbage Patch dolls. The woman in the mirror mercilessly stared in her dreadfully pink cupcake dress wrapped with bows and dreadfully juvenile Goldilocks curls reeking of hairspray.
It was hard to believe that such a hideous thing could exist without sizzling away the retinas of my eyes. It was even harder to believe that I had agreed to wear it for the wedding. She was getting married. My little (little!) sister was getting married.
It was what sappy movies would call a “whirlwind romance,” and it was what I secretly called a “whirlwind infatuation.” It was exactly the type of love that could only happen to someone like my sister. They first met in the women’s restroom. He accidentally walked in, saw her face as she fixed her makeup, and it was love for him at first sight. He scribbled his number down on a piece of toilet paper as she poked fun at his impossible forwardness and the scruffy, uneven mustache that he called “manly.” When she didn’t call, he loitered around the women’s bathroom for weeks afterwards until they, “by chance,” met again. When she finally decided to give him a chance, she fell quickly and impossibly in love on their first date over caramel macchiatos, biscottis, and a two-hour conversation about nothing…and everything. It was what my sister knew as love, love, love. And it was a honeymoon before the wedding even started.
My mom could never control my sister. She was the naïve, wild child who ran free; I was the backbone of the family that everyone relied on. And when my sister announced she was marrying him at 20-years old, my mom only said, “Wait,” to which my sister replied, “It’s fate.” And we all knew it was too late to stop someone who was already gone, gone, gone.
It was a small wedding. They married under a wedding arch decorated with flowers, and bees buzzed around their heads as they said their “I do’s.” We all toasted to their happiness with sparkling apple cider because he couldn’t stomach alcohol and she was underage. I reminisced of the younger us who laughed at boys rather than loved them and toasted bread for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches rather than to happiness. As she fluttered and danced and drunkenly smiled with happiness, I felt more and more young as I stood alone only with my false smiles, a wine cup filled with an unalcoholic beverage in my hand, and a pink cupcake dress with lace that etched lines against my thighs.
