Member-only story
Her Wedding Day
By Kimberly Dark
What it means to leave your body on a day you want to remember…
She’d been dieting in advance of the wedding, for sure. And wow, that dress was pretty small, but she did it. Barely.
This woman was a colleague in an office where I worked with mostly women. She’d been talking about the upcoming happy event for a while, as women do socially when they feel others will be interested. I only heard her stories here and there, in our shared lunchroom. At first, they were background noise as I ate lunch. Women talking about weddings. Blah blah. But she was a good storyteller with an animated personality, so sometimes I became enthralled.
Among the tales of the wedding-dieting-body-shame-grandeur-planning, one story stands out in memory. It takes place on the wedding day.
She got into that dress and it fit like a corset. Remember how fainting couches were invented during the era of frequent corseting because bound women literally needed to recline a bit and catch their breath? Well, there are no fainting couches at wedding receptions.
She couldn’t breathe properly. Or eat.
And she certainly couldn’t admit that her dress was so tight she wanted to die. She couldn’t admit that she should’ve worn the size six dress instead of the size four and that…
