On Saturday, my mom and sis and I got up, piled into the car and drove the three and a half hours to Paradise, a small town near Chico, CA, to see one of my favorite people get married. He was my eighth grade boyfriend, my soul mate, my best friend for many, many years. So I wrapped up all my hopes for him and blew them, like a kiss, to the wind, wanting them to reach him. I felt like the journey north was a video reel of memories of times spent together. My emotions surfaced constantly as I thought of him at the church, preparing for such a big day in his life.

He is the first person I ever talked about marriage with in the context of my life, a man with whom, over many years, I've carried on initmate conversations about our hopes and dreams, the kind of partnership we craved and always, in the end, how much love we'll always have for each other. How well, even at such a young age, we got things off the ground. I feel like so much of my foundation for happiness in relationships comes from him, from cultivating such healthy dialogue, such genuine mutual love and respect in my first relationship.

You can imagine the range of feelings I experience, my eyes unexpectedly welling with tears at any given moment. We were children together. And we were still here after all that time. And he is so intelligent, so creative, so emotive, such a beautiful human being.

I arrived at the wedding, hugged and kissed his family, who I hadn't seen for so long, his little sister, Risa, who I remember as a tiny child, now a beautiful 13 year old. I marked the irony in my mind: She was the age I was when I met her brother. And she still, after all these, years seemed so long. When SJR, walked into the church, my heart felt like it would explode. He winked at me and held my eyes at several points before his wife entered the church. I was so glad he knew where I was and to be there for this moment in his life.

And it all pretty much ends there. SJR has always struggled with two extremes in himself: being a musician and the faster paced lifestyle that goes with the territory and having been raised in a very religious family, whose values seem to conflict with what I feel is more inherently who he is. And the wedding proved that the religious side won, that SJR has resigned himself to living a life very different from the one we imagined, even at 13. Somehow, as I listened to them exchange their vows, including the hated "obey" in her version of the vows, I felt my friendship with him rushing away from me. That closeness we shared becoming a thing of the past. I know his wife won't want to know who I really am (She seems the more conservative of the two)--In some ways, I feel so perplexed. How could someone who loved me, who I was so in sync with for so long, enter into that kind of marriage? It seems to me that there are certain things that won't be compromised, that when we were in such agreement on so many levels, it would be impossible to give up certain things I feel he must be sacrificing to marry in that way.

I want him to have a happy life. I want him to be happy, even if that means we'll never be close as we once were, but I also wanted to love his wife. I wanted to know his children and watch them grow up. I wanted to sit on a porch somewhere with him and look back over the years, like a video reel, well up with emotion and knowing I'd held him there, like that, in my heart, for a lifetime.

July 11, 2001