Weddings are happy occasions.
This has been her mantra for years. It hasn’t changed.
She thinks about when she was engaged to Roy and her old High School friends passed from girlfriends to fiancés to wives in front of her eyes. She thinks about the times she sat beside Roy, the perpetual fiancé, repeating her mantra.
Wedding are happy occasions. Don’t cry.
She thinks about how the mantra never worked, about how she always ended up bitter and depressed and all sorts of emotions that shouldn’t be associated with weddings. She thinks about how she’d repeat the mantra and try to imagine her own wedding.
She thinks about how she went to so many weddings that she’d managed to map out every last detail of her own.
She remembers that she always thought of the wedding, never the marriage. She thinks that should have told her something.
She’s not a fiancé anymore and she thinks it probably sounds like a setback to those old school friends who’ve heard. She tries to remind herself that it’s progress. Lately it’s getting harder to remember why.
Weddings are happy occasions. Don’t cry.
The mantra still stands. ‘Don’t cry’ is becoming applicable on a daily basis.
She sits at Phyllis’ Wedding and tries not to think of her own. It’s hard when the whole thing is playing out in front of her. She thinks of Phyllis and Bob and her and Roy and how hers probably would have been an engagement long enough to make Roy look a little like Bob by the time they finally got down the aisle. She fights the sudden urge to laugh. It’s not really funny.
She didn’t want this wedding, she reminds herself. She was never meant to wear walk down this aisle, in that dress and meet Roy at the other end.
She used to watch the Grooms slip a ring onto their Bride’s finger and wonder if she’d get a Wedding Band before she wore out her Engagement ring. She used to think that she couldn’t feel any worse than she did standing beside Roy, watching all those other women getting their happy endings and worrying her engagement ring around her finger.
She was wrong. She watches Phyllis get the happy ending, in her dress, at her wedding. She didn’t want it. She can’t stop thinking about it now that it’s playing out in front of her.
She’s not beside Roy today but she knows he’s here. She wonders if he’s even noticed the similarities. She doubts it.
Jim is here, of course. She can’t look at him. It’s not that he’s with Karen. Not entirely, anyway. She can’t look at him. Every time she does, and it’s getting rarer, all she can think about is the mess she’s made and the things she can’t say and the way he looked when she broke his heart.
Before, when she looked at him, she liked herself. She saw herself as he wanted her to be, as everything she’d ever wanted to be. He doesn’t have that effect anymore. She can’t look at him because she thinks of May and everything in between. She can’t look at him because when she sees herself reflected back in his eyes, she sees a coward.
Weddings are happy occasions. Don’t cry.
She almost makes it through the ceremony, sticking to her mantra. She risks a sideways glance at Jim. Karen is holding his hand. As Phyllis and Bob walk down the aisle as man and wife, relatives smile approvingly at her tears. She lets them believe that she’s crying because that’s what women seem to do at weddings. She can’t make herself believe it.
She avoids him at the reception but he finds her at the bar.
“When are we going to see some of those famous Beesly dance moves?”
She laughs, properly. The first time she has all day. She vaguely ponders that he’s always been the only one to truly make her laugh. He still is, but these days he’s also the only one that makes her cry.
She wants to tell him that he can see her moves when he asks her to dance.
She wants to tell him that she doesn’t feel like dancing much these days.
She wants to tell him everything.
She doesn’t. Of course.
“Oh, I’m pacing myself.”
She barely hears what he says next. She’s thinking about the double meaning she’s just thrown out. She’s been justifying her lack of honesty lately with the very same excuse. Art classes. Independence. Apartment. Car. Jim. She’s working up to the last one. She thinks it’s turning out to be a very slow pace.
“No, I’m such a dorky dancer.”
“I know! And it’s very cute.”
It’s innocent, probably, but it’s the best thing she’s heard all day. She stops thinking about pacing herself and thinks, really thinks, that maybe he hasn’t completely given up. She thinks about asking him to dance, or talk. She thinks about taking his hand and giving him her heart in the parking lot of this dance hall. She thinks about her pretty dress and how it’s brown, not blue, but how it would still slide perfectly under his hands.
He smiles.
She smiles. (Hello)
The bartender hands him two drinks. She remembers. Her smile drops. He takes Karen her drink. (Goodbye)
She watches him dance with Karen. It still hurts to look at him but she can’t tear her eyes away. She wonders if the pain is showing on her face. She doesn’t care anymore.
She watches him sway, and smile, and laugh with a woman who’s not her. She thinks about how she’d fit much better in his arms.
She wishes she could stop pacing herself, wishes she could take the handbrake off her heart and let the truth pour out.
She stares at him, silently, intently.
He sees her. For the first time in months, she thinks, he really sees her.
Her expression betrays her. Jealousy, loneliness, sadness. She stares at him, the pain magnified by the one hopeful emotion she can’t seem to resist. She thinks he should recognize the expression. He used to wear it every day.
She doesn’t look away. (Hello)
He does. (Goodbye)
Later, she finds herself in the arms of the man she always planned to dance with on this day.
He’s different. Humbled. Changed. He holds her carefully, as though she might break. She thinks she might. He has realized what today could have been. He’s got the band to play their song.
She thinks so much about the other heart she broke that she’s almost forgotten about Roy’s.
She’s tired and lonely.
She used to look at him and see herself the way she’d always been. Quiet, shy, dependable.
She looks at him and sees comfort and love and herself, strong, independent, changed.
He smiles.
She remembers a Rose-tinted version of the best bits of them.
His hand is warm and solid in her palm.
As he leads her to his truck, she’s still thinking about how nice the wedding she planned was. She’s not thinking about the marriage.
~
Weddings are happy occasions.
He’s been telling himself that for years. He thinks of all the High School friend’s weddings. The college friend’s weddings. He thinks about how he sat in the congregation of every one and stared at the bride. Tall, short, blonde, redhead, brunette. He thinks about how he watched them all morph into Pam, kissing Roy. Beautiful. Unattainable. Lost to him forever.
It’s not lost on him that Phyllis has ‘borrowed’ some elements of the Beesly-Anderson wedding. He tries not to hate her ceremony on principle.
Karen squeezes his hand. He squeezes back. He smiles down at her during the ceremony and sees the tiniest hint of tears shining in her eyes. He’s surprised. She doesn’t seem the type to cry at weddings. She surprises him quite a lot sometimes. He marks it down in his mind, under ‘facts to remember about Karen’. Cries at weddings. The little folder of memories is growing and he finds he quite likes it.
He tries to ignore the fact that there’s no corner of his brain for ‘facts to remember about Pam’. They’re everywhere, invading everything, even the simplest memory, to the point that he can’t think of anything without thinking about her.
He wants to look over at her. He resists. It’s getting harder. He misses her, misses her smile and her laugh and the way she always plays with her necklace. He misses who he used to be.
She won’t even look at him anymore. He doesn’t look over for fear he’ll see her like he saw all those Brides. Beautiful. Unattainable. Lost to him forever.
He chances a glance at the end of the ceremony, while Karen is discreetly wiping her eyes. Pam is crying and trying to smile at the same time. He knows, instinctively, that hers are not tears for the Bride.
He wonders if she regrets giving up this wedding for the life she’s chosen. He hopes not. He hopes, though he hates himself for hoping it, that her tears are from loneliness. He hopes she cries because she wishes she was standing beside him, holding his hand, crying wedding-appropriate tears.
He wonders when he became the sort of man that wishes the woman he loved (still loves) was crying over him.
He hates to see her cry, he always has, but these tears spark more than pain inside him. Hope blossoms out of nowhere. He can’t be bothered suppressing it today.
He chances a glance that becomes a lingering look, one second away from a stare (he categorized all the ways of looking at her years ago). He tries to see through to the truth sparkling in her tears. She wipes them away before he can decide if it’s joy, or regret, or loneliness.
He finds her at the Reception, still wondering.
“When are we going to see some of those famous Beesly dance moves?”
She laughs. He still can’t shake the little jolt of happiness that shocks him when he makes he face light up like this.
“Oh, I’m pacing myself,” she says, with a smile.
He wants to say she’s been pacing herself for years and it’s about time she stopped it.
He wants to offer her his hand and a dance and maybe, just maybe, his heart (again).
He wants to do something, anything, to give her a sign that he’s still here. Still Jim underneath the new suits and the new life and the lies he tells himself every morning.
He wants to give her a chance.
He ignores the voice that sounds a lot like Karen reminding him that he has a girlfriend and a new life and an almost, sort of, slightly, haphazardly, patched up broken heart that really shouldn’t be entering into any strenuous activity just yet.
“I’m such a dorky dancer.”
“I know! And it’s very cute.” (Hello)
It’s not much, admittedly. He’s not the risk taker he was anymore.
It’s something, a subtle hint, a nudge in his direction. Today he can’t shake the feeling that she wants to tell him something.
The bartender passes him two drinks. The spell is broken. Her smile falls. (Goodbye)
“Hypothetically, if I thought Pam was interested then ...”
He can’t stop himself. The new him is falling apart at the seams and he can’t bring himself to care.
He remembers who he’s talking to.
“...No it’s totally hypothetical.”
Karen loves weddings, she tells him after a few fancy cocktails he can barely pronounce. He thinks about telling her that he hates them but then he thinks about why that is. He asks her to dance instead.
They sway to the music and he’s almost content, almost happy to forget the ifs and maybes of his relationship with Pam for the certain, straightforward one with Karen.
He looks up and it all falls apart.
She’s staring at them. At him.
He can’t think about the sorrow, or the pain, or the loneliness in her face when there’s something that looks a lot like love in her eyes.
She holds his gaze and he thinks, maybe.
Karen says something pointless and the spell, again, as always, is broken.
He tears his eyes away but he knows his heart is still over there with the girl in the brown dress, with the sad eyes. He thinks it’s probably always been there.
The rest of the night passes in a sort of haze.
He talks and jokes and laughs with the guests.
He spends the whole night thinking, planning, hoping. Maybe.
He thinks about how Pam might never be the one to say something. He thinks about how she looked when he danced with Karen and thinks, maybe she doesn’t have to. He thinks wild thoughts about breaking up with Karen, about trying, against all his better judgement, to tell Pam that he still loves her.
He thinks, maybe. (Hello)
He sees her. With Roy. Holding his hand, heading to his truck. (Goodbye)
The last coherent thought he can manage is that it always seems to be in parking lots that his heart falls to pieces.
Later, he thinks about the ceremony, and the reception, and how this time he definitely misinterpreted things.
It wasn’t him, it never was.
She misses Roy.
She regrets calling off the wedding.
She doesn’t love him. She never has.
He thinks of Karen. He knows what it means when she smiles at him, when she kisses him. She smiles. He smiles back.
He stops telling himself, maybe.
He tells himself, enough. Enough now.
~
Author's Chapter Notes:
He thinks, maybe. (Hello)
He sees her. With Roy. Holding his hand, heading to his truck. (Goodbye)
Chapter End Notes:
I couldn't rewatch this ep before I wrote this so apologies if any parts seem off. And apologies if it's depressing, it needed to be done to set up what's coming. And yes, I slightly stole the last line from Love Actually.
Thanks so much to everyone who's read and reviewed. Your comments and encouragement are always appreciated.
Thanks so much to everyone who's read and reviewed. Your comments and encouragement are always appreciated.
