Until Death
“I’m just not at that point in my life, you know?” says the person who I think might be a friend of a friend of a friend once removed. It was at this moment that I decide I am done. I hate this wedding and everyone at it. I take a swig of my champagne and thank God that the conversation is interrupted by a round of applause reverberating around the reception hall, so I don’t have to reply to her. I turn to my wife. She has been stuck in an hours-long conversation with my cousin about real estate, and so I politely interrupt the conversation to save her sanity, “What toast are we up to now?” I ask her.
“I think we’re up to maybe the four hundred and thirty-fifth?” she replies, “I think this is the forty-third best man.”
The toasts have been going on for several days now. But, unfortunately, I’m somewhere on the best man list and have to say something at some point, so I can’t just get completely blackout drunk, “Oh god,” I say, “How long is left in this wedding?”
“Another couple of days, I think-” she is interrupted as there is a loud thunk from the other side of the table. Someone who might be one of my cousins twice removed has passed out from exhaustion. My wife continues, “And then we have your friend Jim’s wedding starting about half an hour after this.”
Nowadays, weddings take weeks, and you have nowhere to sleep. You sort of just pass out from exhaustion in your seat every now and then. It’s sort of like travelling on an aeroplane, except the only in-flight entertainment is these god-awful speeches, and at least with a plane, you have the outside chance of a fiery crash ending the horrible experience for you.
I let out a long sigh and get my drink refiled. Nobody knows when it happened exactly. Some of us are still old enough to remember a different world. Weddings were much rarer back then. They could even be fun sometimes. But slowly, they just became more and more numerous. Suddenly every weekend was taken up by one. And then people started wanting their weddings to stand out. What was once a one-night affair slowly became an entire three-day celebration. Then people had to one-up that, and weddings became this week-long affair. Suddenly the whole economy started to become structured around continuous weddings. If you aren’t invited to a wedding, you are probably working at it anyway. Soon people, in their constant state of exhaustion and tipsiness, forgot that there was an alternative to this madness and just accepted this as reality.
Governments had no choice but to comply. The country would be thrown into chaos If they let the new wedding-based economy collapse. At first, it was just subsidies for the wedding industry, but as the lobbyists started to multiply, soon getting married was mandatory by twenty-five. Divorce was still permitted, so long as you had your next partner and wedding lined up within ninety days of your settlement.
That is how I ended up with my wife. I had attempted to spend my life as a carefree bachelor, but the government penalties for singledom got worse and worse. First, it was just higher taxes and then prison terms. Then eventually, they came up with the ultimate deterrent: anyone who didn’t comply would be forced to become a wedding DJ. So I rather quickly had to find someone and found my wife, who was in a similar predicament. We hate each other, of course, as we both see each other as the symbol of our capitulation and subjugation. Also, she has this terrible laugh I can’t stand. We would just get divorced, but the one thing we have in common is that we both hate weddings. Ours was bad enough. We can’t subject society to another two.
Not everyone tried to resist as we did. Most people have just entered a sort of zombified state of acceptance. They drink their champagne and think, “How elegant”, even though it’s the only thing they’ve had to drink for five months. They aww at the speeches even though most of them are incomprehensible due to exhaustion and drinking for four days straight. They take photos to post on Instagram, even though it is now nothing but a stream of wedding photos. All the while, they obsessively make notes for their own wedding day. I suppose that in this world, where all that exists is weddings, it makes sense. Planning your own is the one time any of us have any semblance of control, the only time they will have an inkling of freedom. Of course, the irony of it is their moment of freedom dooms the rest of us. Thousands and thousands of moments of freedom stacking up to keep us trapped in this horrible system. It’s pretty clever when you think about it. This system isn’t the result of some tyrant or regime. It just came about naturally. We did it all to ourselves, no one made us, and plenty of people said it was kind of a bad idea (but in the end, none of them would risk the embarrassment of missing an invite).
Another speech ends, and the sounds of forced clapping reverberate around the hall. The wedding hall was a gigantic feat of engineering, a vast hollow space composed of giant concrete arches. To keep the wedding-based economy going, this was just one of the thousands of similar structures that had been built in the most extensive government infrastructure program ever devised. Of course, public land had to be repurposed for this new continuous matrimonial society. I’m told where I am standing used to be a charming park. But even with its grand scale and arches so spectacular that architects can’t get within a hundred metres of the building without having an orgasm, somehow, the scene before me wasn’t impressive. The dishevelled masses of miserable wedding guests just brought a shadow over any attempt at grandeur. You can’t look at a table without seeing a catatonic state, or someone passed out from exhaustion, or just somebody plain old crying uncontrollably. No one looks good. We have no time to dry clean suits, go to the salon or even shave sometimes. We do the best we can to wash up in the bathroom of one wedding before rushing to the next.
I decide I need a break from this depressing picture in front of me and head towards the bathroom. Once upon a time, I might have politely excused myself, but I stopped caring about pretty much anything a while ago. On the way to the men’s room, I walk past my aunt. She is in the fetal position in the hallway, sobbing uncontrollably. Some freshly delivered wedding invites are in her hand that collectively will engage her for the next several months. I would console her, but you know, the whole not caring thing.
Inside the bathroom, there isn’t much room as the paramedics have wheeled their gurney inside. Legally, to keep the massive wedding clothing industry afloat, everyone inside a wedding hall has to match the dress code. So the two paramedics are in a tuxedo and a rather lovely long black dress as they try to remove the body from the bathroom. It was another hanging. Those are becoming rarer since they brought in that law making it so that belts are not strong enough to hold up a full-grown adult. But there are enough older belts in circulation that hangings are still reasonably frequent. I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t thought about it. I discretely wash my hands and leave just as they finally cut through the belt, and the body flops to the floor.
I take a different route back to my table to avoid my aunt, which means I pass by the gifts table. It seems very archaic now. Children will often ask what the point of this strange wedding gift ritual is. None of us has any time to go and buy gifts, and the bride and groom certainly have no time to use any of them. So they just get recycled. We all just pick up a random gift at the end of each ceremony and take it with us to the next wedding. This has been going on for so long though the gifts aren’t what they used to be. The wrapping paper is mostly torn. Many of the boxes have dents from being dropped by a barely conscious guest travelling between venues. But we persist because no one dares question the tradition. There was also a guest book on the table. I didn’t bother reading it. All that would be inside would either be the zombie’s generic messages about love and happiness or the barely legible scrawlings of wedding guests who have cracked and written something along the lines of: “Please God, when will this end!”
I make it back to my table and reluctantly sit down. The speeches are unending, so I down glass after glass of cheap champagne until the combination of booze and exhaustion bring on sweet unconsciousness.
A loud crash brings me back to this hellish reality. How long was I out? Looking at the stubble of some of my fellow inmates, it looks like I have been out for a few days. Eventually, I wake up enough to realise that everyone is looking at the source of the crash. It appears a large group of people have just knocked down the main door to the hall.
“This wedding is now under the control of the spinster revolution!” shouts the apparent leader, who fires a few shots out of their rifle into the ceiling for emphasis. Most of the hall simply groans. This happens every dozen weddings. All it will do is delay things and drag everything out more. The spinster revolution is a separatist movement trying to topple to government and save us all from this nightmare. Of course, I like the idea, but things have gone too far. There’s no way a bunch of kids with guns and ideals are going to fix things. They start walking towards the altar. The group is purposely a stark contrast to the rest of the hall. They are dressed as casually as possible, t-shirts and ripped jeans, to protest the government’s formal wear mandate. They snatch the microphone and start reading out their manifesto. We’ve all heard it before. Suddenly there is an explosion at the back of the hall, and a team of special forces quickly take up positions. They are early. The spinsters usually get at least halfway through the manifesto before they get here. The special forces soldiers are all following the law and are wearing very expensive tuxedos that perfectly match their assault rifles and helmets, “Drop your weapons!” shouts one of the soldiers.
“We will not be silenced by you monogamous assholes!” the spinsters shout back, and so the shooting starts. Several rebels take refuge behind the wedding cake, which is shortly obliterated in a spray of frosting and lead. Grenades go flying, and entire tables of wedding guests are wiped out. A soldier tries to use the novelty photo booth as cover, and both he and the booth are shortly taken out by a grenade, to great relief from many wedding guests.
Unfortunately, where we are sitting, at table 712, we are situated between the special forces breach point and the altar where the spinsters are making their stand. A spray of government bullets peppers our table. None of us has enough energy to do anything like duck for cover. I look down at my chest. There is a new hole amongst the field of existing ones in my ancient formal shirt. This one is also seeping a lot of blood. I collapse on the floor. It’s a change to feel sharp physical pain instead of the slow burn of the existential pain of the last decade or so of weddings. I look to one of my cousins for help. All he is capable of doing is passing my drink down to where I am lying. I accept it and decide it isn’t the worst idea. As I take the last drink of my life, my wife looks down at me jealously, no doubt realising she will now have to get married again. I shrug my shoulders and give her my apologies as I finish my glass. I start to feel light-headed, and the world begins to fade away. I close my eyes and listen as the gunfire and explosions echo through the hall. I think about how I’ll never have to go to another wedding ever again, and I die with a smile on my face.