I know that I was not unintelligent, but I did not control. I was not insensitive, but I could not see. I was, perhaps, simply too young, and so I committed a capitulation, an aberration. I lacked courage, but in general I have always lacked courage. It was not courage that brought me here. Now I am old, and I see.

The wedding. Everything about it hazy, dreamlike, faces floating, smiling, words coming from a long distance, from me, to me, dancing, smiling. I think I was happy that day; but everything was murky, unreal, and I don’t really recall.

The night before, my mother and I cried. Suddenly I didn’t want to be married, I wasn’t ready, I wanted to stay home and be safe and alone; I was filled with panic. I can feel the beginning of tears, a tightening in my stomach, remembering.

I was nineteen. A year older than Katie is now, think of that, and is she ready and does she need me to weep with her?

Stephen was already at university; we’d been together for almost three years, and we didn’t want to wait any longer. We were too much apart, with him away at school, and so we were getting married. He asked me in April, a chilly evening; we were in my parents’ living room and they were downstairs playing cards and we had nowhere that we could go, felt trapped, and Stephen said, “It’s stupid to go on like this, let’s just get married and the hell with it.”

I said yes and was frightened. My parents asked us to wait, we said we were tired of waiting, and they didn’t seem to really object. I think, actually, that they were pleased. Stephen’s parents, too, when we told them.

We couldn’t afford a ring, so Stephen’s grandmother gave us hers. We would rent an apartment in Toronto, be married in July, I would find a job, and by the time Stephen’s classes started in September we would be well settled. It was all so clear.

It was what I had always expected for myself, what I had, I suppose, been taught to expect, although I cannot tell just when or how. I know I never doubted how it would be, although I am unsure how I saw the self I knew fitted to the life I saw. The vision I had, unquestioned, what was it?

No, not a vision but an assumption. A vague, undetailed picture of me, children, husband and house, comfort, security. But none of it, I see now, had any shape or form. I didn’t think about what it would mean, what it would be like. I was a character in a movie of my future, and it was a very pleasant movie, but it was unconnected with myself. I had never thought. I find that extraordinary now, but not surprising.