When we got engaged, I really thought we made it. It felt like we were given the keys to the front gate of the garden and that the days in the apartment outside of its walls were over. I thought I’d finally become one of them, that they would see our life as something they could recognize and welcome into the fold for the first time.

It was so important to me; it was the reason I walked and breathed. I loved them so much.

But then the day of the wedding finally came. When I showed up to the garden gate that morning, knocking on the door and hearing my hope for redemption reverberate in every slamming of the door knocker, I was greeted by the smell of smoke, not footsteps en route to answer the door.

Instead for letting us in, my family decided to self-immolate, to burn the motherfucker down. In some perverse, inalienable logic, it was easier to destroy the entire institution than to sit next to two husbands at Thanksgiving dinner.

First, though, they took the opportunity to put me back in my place one last time. In no uncertain terms, they let me know there is nothing I could ever build that they would attribute any sort of gravity, dignity, or relevance.

No brand-name career I could find. No rocket ship I could build. No poem I could write. No partner I could love.

Nothing.

Still today, I have a lot of difficulty separating out the beauty of that day and the start of the life that followed from its original trauma.

I’m going to be seeing my family every week this month, starting Wednesday night, and it will be for the first time since we got married. My parents’ upcoming move to Denver is making my desire for reconciliation feel insurmountably urgent. A now-or-never type of ordeal.

This first trip feels less like a reunion than a return to the scene of that original site of the family arson. I am preparing myself to sift through a giant plot of ashes to see what there is left to recover.

I don’t know whose bodies I expect to find in the debris, but I hope it will bring me peace when I find it.

This hurts so much.

I just want to be okay again.

******

This essay adapted from correspondence with my best friend.