What Comes After

August 5th

What a day! There's just so much that happened.

A couple of hours after I finished writing yesterday's entry, May practically lost all of her steam and went to sleep at what I felt like was eleven at night. Mom and Dad spent most of the night preparing the wedding, both of them sleeping sometime after midnight, which was when I went to sleep.

They woke up early in the morning to just set everything up and move furniture around to make space. It was snowing outside, small gray flakes of ash from volcanoes hundreds of miles away were falling on the dead grass. Who knew that a summer wedding would turn into what feels like a winter wonderland? Who even expected that a wedding would happen?

Mom and Dad cleared out an empty space in the middle of the living room and brought the dining room chairs for us to sit in. We had some string up lights for Christmas that haven't been used since second or third grade when we stopped setting up the Christmas tree, partially because the last time we did this, no one bothered to take down the Christmas tree until the middle of summer.

May and I also cut out flowers from paper and pasted it onto a banner that would be behind where Mira and Leon would exchange their vows. I also found some green yarn and twisted it around the chairs and pasted the remaining paper flowers on the chairs because we might as well make use of our resources. We were going to have a very floral wedding, which was pretty ironic since all the flowers are dead from the ashfall.

Grandma and Grandpa did all the cooking in the morning for the wedding, taking out cans and bags of flour. "But what about the whole conserving food thing?" I asked Mom.

"We'll figure it out later," Mom said. "It's a wedding. We can figure out how we're going to make it past afterwards."

The delicious aroma of what Grandma and Grandpa were cooking wafted through the air as they cut scallions and scattered them on flat cakes of flour before pan-frying them, and all of a sudden, I thought of something. "Is it alright if I bring a friend over?" I asked.

"You'd probably have to ask Mira about that," Mom said. "She'll probably say yes though but ask her just in case. You don't want to mess up her day."

Dad called Mom's name after that, probably to help him with finding some wedding gifts for Leon. We've got a mountain of old vintage things in and around the garage, hiding in old cardboard boxes. Dad moved some of them around and into the closet by the garage when we made space for the greenhouse and wood storage pile, so that's probably why Dad was calling for her.

I walked towards Mira's room. It was closed, and I didn't want to catch her off guard, so I knocked on the door.

"If it's you, Leon, I told you that visiting the bride before the wedding is bad luck," she shouted.

"Well, luckily for you, this is not Leon," I said. "Can I come in?"

"Yeah," she said. "Just wait a sec."

There was some shuffling of footsteps before she opened the door. She was dressed in a long, white gown that swept across the ground, trailing a couple of feet behind her. Her hair was done all fancy and she was smiling.

"So, how do I look?" she asked.

"You look fine," I said.

"Only fine?" she asked.

"You look great," I said.

"I feel terrible," she said. "And this dress is so long that every time that I stand up, I feel like I'm going to trip over it and my makeup is smudged and—"

"Is something wrong?" I asked.

She sighed. "I'm so nervous."

"You'll be fine," I said. "You've done scarier things before. How bad can a wedding be compared to bungee jumping at one of those amusement parts? A wedding should be a piece of cake."

"But that's bungee jumping," she replied. "All you're doing is just taking a chance at a moment. You don't have to think about what comes after. You just close your eyes and fall. You can't do this with a wedding because things happen afterwards, and it's just stressful to live with the consequences of what happens afterwards."

"What's the worst that could happen afterwards?" I asked.

"I could mess everything up," she said. "Maybe I'll forget my vows or—"

"You won't," I said. "And who cares about forgetting your vows? None of us will hold it against you—"

"I care," she said. "I don't know why, but I care a lot."

"This is about Leon leaving, isn't it?"

There was silence in the room. She looked down at her engagement ring.

"This day might be the last time I'll ever see him," she said. "I just want everything to go perfectly today because I want his last impression of me to be good, not embarrassing or anything."

"And everything will go alright," I said and leaned against the door frame.

"Oh, yeah," she said. "Sorry for putting all my stress and anxiety onto you. You came here to talk to me about something."

"Uh, yeah. I was just wondering if it'd be alright if I invited Charles over," I said. "If you're not alright with it then that's totally fine—"

"Bring him over," she said. "If this is my last wedding, I might as well make it big."

"And his family?"

"Sure," Mira said.

I turned towards the door and looked back. Mira was fidgeting with her dress.

"You're going to be fine," I said.

"Thanks," she said with a little smile. "Make sure to get them quickly."

So I put on my mask and told Mom that I was going out to see if Charles wanted to come to the wedding. The ashfall that buried our backyard in the morning had stopped, and the sky was merely a dark shade of gray. I had wished for the Moon to disappear, but did the world have to take the Sun along with it?

The trees had shed all of their leaves and with the ash laying on top of the bare branches, it looked like it had been snowing. If I took a picture of that tree, you'd probably think that it was from some state in the Northeast, not here in coastal California where it never snows, and the sun is usually shining.

When I reached Charles' house and looked at it, I thought they had moved out. There was no light inside, not even shining through the thin curtains, and it was almost like nobody was there anymore and that they had moved on. I nearly didn't knock on the door because it'd be awkward knocking on the door for an empty house, but I did so anyway because I knew that Charles wouldn't leave without telling me.

There was movement behind the door, but not the frenzied footsteps that I heard from a couple days ago, but more subdued and tired. The door opened, and I saw Charles. He looked pretty bad, deep bags underneath his eyes that made me feel his tiredness.

"Hey," I said.

"Hey."

"You alright?" I asked even though I knew the answer.

"We're making it through," Charles said. "So, do you have the, you know?"

"No, but I've got something better," I said. "My sister is getting married—"

"With everything that's happening?"

"Believe me. I'm pretty much as surprised as you are," I said. "Anyways, our family is making a bunch of food for the wedding, and it'll be fun, and I was wondering if you or your family would be interested in coming."

"Yeah, I can come," he said. "I don't think my parents can though. They've—"

He took a deep breath. "They've sacrificed a lot."

"We can bring some food back," I said. "My grandparents always make too much food anyways."

"And your family won't mind?"

"Of course not," I said.

The sky had begun to lightly snow ash again, little flakes of it drifting onto the patio and through his door. Charles stepped out and closed the door. "Do you think it's snowing now?" he asked. "Actual snow, not ash."

"Probably not," I said. "Maybe in the future, though. Who knows what's going to happen after?"

"Yeah," he said, and there was a silence between us before continuing. "You know what I just realized, I don't have any suits or any formal wear for the wedding. I used to, but—"

"I think I've got a spare one," I said, knowing what had happened with his suit. "My dad definitely has a spare one, so you can take mine, and I'll take my Dad's one if things don't work out."

"Okay," he said and nodded. "Are we leaving now?"

"Yeah, yeah," I said. "My sister told me to hurry back, so we'd probably want to do that."

"I'll be out in a minute," he said. "Just need to grab a mask and tell my parents."

I waited for about a minute for him, and then once he appeared, we began to walk back. There was this awkward silence between us as the ocean gusts kicked up small clouds of ash, which skittered around before fading away. We talked about stuff for a solid minute or two during the twenty-minute walk, but it was more to fill the air with sound than to actually hold a conversation.