There's No Honeymoon Phase

'Twas a bright and sunny day,

her golden locks bounced into view.

I searched for courage to say,

in hopes reply would be "I do."

I approached her dear mother,

with my request less than modest,

hoping there was no other,

lest my heart be torn from my chest.

Astrid Sidaway-Wolf: a woman so nice, they surnamed her twice. Thrice if you add on my own, as you will, because this is the story of when she and I got married (and later divorced).

Working in retail can be somewhat mind-numbing as the days go on, and, in my department, I'm often working alone with no one to speak to...aside from customers, but I try to ignore them as much as possible. Sometimes, in order to keep up the morale of the store, it's necessary to make things more interesting by being insanely delightful. It is very fortunate for my co-workers that I'm both adorable and hilarious. And modest.

Now, the story really starts a few months earlier, when Astrid was dog-tired, crazy sick, and trying desperately to work the photo-counter on her own. Her saintly mother travelled over into my department to find some cold medication for her poor daughter so she wouldn't pass out in front of customers and make a scene. I happened to be putting cold medications onto the shelf when my future mother-in-law came in, and I began helping her choose out the proper one, only to later learn that she was the mother of my soon-to-be-bride. We had a friendly conversation, and she went about medicating her daughter, and she waved goodbye to me later on as she was leaving the store. That's when I knew I had an in.

Travelling forward to the day in question, Astrid and Mom-in-Law were browsing the shelves before Astrid started her shift, and I happened to run into them (read: I stalked them through the store and waited for an opportunity to strike). Astrid made introductions along the lines of "this is my mom, I think you two have met before?" and I then agreed, and went into the epic tale of how we scoured the pharmacy looking to cure the lovely young lady. I then turned to Mom-in-law and said: "by the way, I'm going to marry your daughter." I realized later that it would have been much more proper to...ask for permission to marry into the family. Or, you know, to inform Astrid of the fact that she and I were engaged. Astrid was, at first, taken aback, but quickly started laughing. Her mother, on the other hand, had a response that I will not forget for a long time to come. She looked at me, shrugged her shoulders, and said, "okay," then continued about her business. I'm left to believe that she's so exasperated by Astrid's choices in men that she's just given up entirely on her daughter finding a suitable man and instead shifted her focus onto Astrid's brother Fraser.

I parted ways with my betrothed and went to cover for a cashier's break, telling the cashier to go over to photos to congratulate Astrid on her engagement.  I suppose it would have been prudent to tell the cashier that it was a fake engagement, but I preferred my method of playing with the emotions of everyone in the store. Word quickly spread through the departments that Astrid was getting married, and while most people understood that it was simply a joke, there were a few people that would come to me throughout the day to say, "...wow, you know...I didn't even know that you and Astrid were dating." I liked to tell them that it was an arranged Mormon marriage.

Once the majority of our co-workers, including most of our management team, had congratulated Astrid on her engagement, the computer department bought us a wedding card, signing it from the three members of the department staff present that day and several other fictional employees. It was around this time during the day that people started asking me "what the deal [was] with [me] and Astrid," to which I responded that we were desperately in love. The usual reply to that was: "well, clearly SHE'S desperate!" Oh, snap.

I have no idea what was going on in Astrid's head during this shift, but I imagine she had convinced herself that she was either still sleeping, or had been slipped some form of super-drug that made her incredibly high.

Now that the computer department had gotten us a card, I had to go about upstaging that. So I went to the cosmetics counter and found a ring with a suitably-sized (fake) diamond, and I took it over to Astrid. In retrospect, I should have gotten down on one knee and proposed to her, but the engagement had already been on for the greater part of the day, and there were customers around. She had actually been speaking to a customer when I interrupted them to give her the ring. She laughed and put it on, and when she found that it was too big, she handed it back to me and told me to get another one. I chuckled and her face dropped from happiness to anger, and she confirmed that she was, indeed, quite serious. I locked eyes momentarily with the customer only to have her comment, "it starts already, huh?"

So I trekked back over the entire store, back to the cosmetics counter, and found a smaller ring. This time, I chose a combo-deal, which included the engagement ring and the wedding ring, because things had just gotten that much more serious. I returned to the photo counter and asked Astrid to try it on before I took the hard-plastic hanger off, to which she complained that "[she couldn't] get it on with the plastic thing in the way," but agreed that the smaller ring would likely fit. Then she stared at me for a moment before asking about getting the plastic hanger off. I told her she would have to cut it off, as I did to the other ring, and she once more complained about all the work I was making her do. Seriously, Astrid? I still feel like I was the only one working at this relationship. Just get a pair of scissors out, woman, I can't be doing everything!

As she examined the rings on her finger, she mentioned that our relationship was moving far faster than she had expected, and I let her know that I was just in a hurry to have babies. She, too, is looking to make some babies, but apparently not with me. According to her, our children would be "far too pale to live on the outside world," and she instead plans to have her friend Griffin's children. I would be offended, but Astrid and I are both awfully white, and I'm pretty sure our kids would be allergic to sunlight. Also, Griffin's attractiveness clearly betrays his incredible genes, so it appears that we came to the agreement that Astrid and I would raise Griffin's children together, possibly underground since Astrid and I are too white to be real people.

We both went back to work, happily married, but separated by eight aisles. People continued congratulating us throughout the day, asking if I'd gotten her a ring, asking when the wedding was, and in typing this out I'm suddenly realizing just how invested these people became in a fake relationship that they weren't a part of. Seeing as how we were half a store away from each other, it's understandable that there would be things happening around Astrid that I would be completely unaware of. Like the allergic reaction that my fake-ass rings gave her. Since I wasn't there, I can't confirm the following, but this is how I like to think things went down: first, Astrid noticed a persistent itching in her ring finger, but continued to work along like the professional that she is. Then, she looks down, only to see that the finger had started to turn purple around the ring, and when she tried to take it off, she learned that her finger had swollen. The allergic reaction quickly spread throughout her body, engorging every feature to twice it's size, and it's progress was only impeded once she had grown to such massive proportions that the ring snapped in half and fell off of her finger as though it were nothing more than an onion ring. She was rushed to the hospital in an attempt to save her life, but it was too late: the combination of my ring and Astrid's finger had turned her into the carrier of a deadly disease that would go on to spread throughout the world's population, turning normal people into the engorged monster that Astrid herself had become.

I'm about ninety-percent sure that that's exactly what happened. Anyway, once she had made it back to work that day, and was explaining to me why she no longer was wearing the ring that she made me go back and get her, it became clear to me that, in refusing my plague-ring, she was letting me know that things were over between us. The divorce settlement was quite easy, because neither of us own anything, and our workplace reverted back to the status-quo.

Thank you, Astrid Sidaway-Wolf-Lundy. Without you I would never have experienced life as the "it couple." Also, I understand, and accept, that you're the sort of crazy person that has every detail of her day plotted out before it happens. But you should also know that I am, too, just to a far lesser extent. You have mentioned to me several times over the last few days that you haven't seen our magnificent love story published in my blog (until today, obviously), but you should also be aware of how that threw off my entire schedule.

Yes, I had a schedule for this. On the white board in my bedroom, where I keep my to-do list and my credit card transactions, I also have listed the next 10 entries for this blog. This is so that I know what stories I want to tell, where they would fit in best, and it lets me ponder the details for a while so that I don't leave out any really important details. Our story was meant to be on November 27th, but since you were so determined to have it immediately, I had to bump today's scheduled story to the 18th, that story to the 24th, and that story to the 27th.

But maybe that's the kind of crazy that only people like us can appreciate. Neurotic white people, I mean.

PS. I'm coming to your next family dinner.