February 3, 2016

Chapter 31: February 3, 2016

On February 3, 2016, I got married. I wrote it down. I wrote all of it down because I knew the act of writing it might be the only thing that made it real, I’d sit there, with a pen and notebook in my hand, holding back tears, letting a few fall down, it’s dampness leaving wet marks on the pages.

I got married.

There is no poetry to that sentence. There shouldn’t be. The facts are often enough. We wore what we wore. We said what people say. There were photos, but I don’t remember smiling in the way the photos suggest. I remember the temperature, the shoes pinching, the way my voice felt like it belonged to someone else when I said the vows. I wrote it all down. Not because I wanted to remember, but because I wanted to prove it happened. Memory is slippery; ink is arrogant. I trusted the paper more than I trusted myself.

At the time, I didn’t think of it as a performance. Only later, when the film in my head started to rewind itself without asking, did I start to see the blocking, the lighting cues, the way I had framed the entire thing.

February 3, 2016.

I married a woman to help her with her green card.

That sentence sounds transactional, because it was. But it was also something else—something more difficult to explain and less comfortable to confess. It was a decision made in broad daylight, with full awareness, but not full understanding.

I changed my life that day. Changed it not in the dramatic sense people like to believe in—no falling curtains, no swelling music. I changed it the way people change a lightbulb in a room they no longer live in. Mechanically. Out of necessity. I remember the courthouse was cold. I remember how we signed the documents and shook hands with someone who called us “a beautiful couple.” I remember the hollowness of it all, the way the moment refused to become sentimental even when I begged it to in my head. I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel about it. I have cycled through guilt, relief, numbness, and something like pride. None of it has stuck. What has stuck is the knowledge that this moment—this quiet, bureaucratic collision of two strangers in need—is my destiny, forever lost in time.

There are no photos on my walls. No champagne cork saved in a drawer. But I wrote it down, and writing it down makes it real. That’s what Didion understood: if you name the ghost, it can’t keep pretending it never lived.

On February 3, 2016, I got married.

It felt like one of those things you do because you have to, not because you want to, and yet it changes you anyway. Some moments, no matter how much you try to compartmentalize them, refuse to stay neatly tucked away. They bleed through. The moment doesn’t just pass; it leaves a mark. In my case, it’s a thin, permanent line running through everything that came before it, everything that came after it. And now, as I sit here, a man who did it for a future, I can’t help but wonder what I might have been if I had never signed that paper, never taken that step. But that’s the point: I’ll never know. There are no roads left to wander down except the one I’ve already walked. And I can’t go back.

On February 3, 2016... I saw a part of me die. I finally realized none of it matters—not the intricacy in the details, not what was said or how to pass blame. I died in the City of Angels, quietly, without ceremony. Saying goodbye to everything I once knew—the faces, the names I will not allow myself to say aloud, the actions, those actions in particular—that made me believe that dying meant disappearing. But my death wasn’t physical that day.

My demise was one of love.

I was reborn into something colder, quieter, and maybe—if I’m honest—more honest. This city doesn’t just kill you with failure. Sometimes it kills you with what you’re willing to do to stay. You don’t always get to choose what saves you. Sometimes you perform a life until it becomes your only way to live it. Sometimes survival wears the costume of love, and sometimes love is just a rumor you tell yourself to make the scene believable. People come to this city to be seen, to be cast, to be chosen. But no one tells you how quietly you can disappear here. I lived. I died. Not in the literal sense, but in the way people do when they trade one version of themselves for another and forget which one came first.

That’s the thing about Living And Dying in Los Angeles—you usually don’t know which one you’re doing until the credits roll. And when they do, there's no applause. No standing ovation. Just the hum of a projector in an empty room, flickering light bouncing off chairs no one sat in. You realize the performance was for no one. The love, the loss, the quiet compromises—they were your lines alone to speak, your silence alone to hold. No one cheers when the lights come up. No one tells you it’s over. You just sit there, watching the reel go blank, wondering if anyone ever saw it at all.