We agreed to leave the house at 9 AM, but are out the door at 8:45 AM to pick up coffee and breakfast. My sisters, boyfriend, and I are all in the car, en route to a relative's wedding. It’s an event that my sisters and I have anticipated for over a year, hyping it up amongst ourselves at every Thanksgiving, Christmas, and touchpoint in between holidays. This is the closest relative to us to get married thus far, the most connected we’ve ever been to a bride, to the center of an event. The three of us are always talking about wanting something to happen, as we surf YouTube and stare at the trees in our backyard. Stuff, obviously, happens to us all the time - and even more often, around us - but we’re often too absorbed in ourselves and in our phones to notice, so we fixate on these tentpole events. This morning, we’re sitting up straight and looking out the window as we embark on the two-hour drive to the ferry terminal and, later, the one-hour ferry voyage to the wedding venue on San Juan Island.
I, however, am feeling stressed, as I try to find a coffee and breakfast place that suits everybody’s needs. My boyfriend is driving and I am the oldest of my sisters so the responsibility to find food has unspokenly fallen on me. We arrive at a restaurant with good bagels and mediocre coffee and decide that we have enough time to stop at a separate coffee shop (we’re all (obnoxiously) Seattle-born and bred so we’re a bit snobbish about coffee).
As we wait for our bagel orders, I re-read the email for our ferry reservation and see that it recommends arriving at the terminal about an hour ahead of departure to secure a spot in line. Now my chest is getting a bit hot, as it tends to do when dealing with travel logistics. As we return to the car with warm bagel sandwiches, I tell everyone that we should forego coffee and just head to the terminal, we’ll be cutting it too close by going to another establishment. Everyone thinks I’m overreacting, stressing that we don’t actually need to arrive at the ferry terminal that early - the email is just saying so out of caution. But now I’m starting to get nervous. I’m picturing a car accident occurring on the way to the terminal, an eight-car pileup that jams the 405 into gridlock. I’m picturing the four of us arriving at an empty ferry terminal, the passengers waving as we stand dumb on the shore. I’m picturing us discovering that we reserved the ferry for the wrong date and missing the wedding altogether. So my voice rises with a bit more urgency, begging my family to “just listen to me” and also to “turn down the music” because I’m starting to sweat.
Everyone ends up listening to me, begrudgingly, likely to assuage my worries more than anything, and we skip coffee and merge onto I-405 North. The air has grown a bit thicker in the car now as I wolf down my BLTA on toasted Everything, the bagel scratching the roof of my mouth with each bite. I know the people in this car better than I know anyone so I can read their quiet annoyance with me as easily as words on a page. These are the people I try to annoy the least but inevitably end up annoying the most. I try to make conversation but my sisters have fallen asleep in the backseat - they never got their coffees after all. I’ve squashed the mood with my anxiety. I’m disappointed. We sit in the quiet - in the hot, dense air of the Camry. I simultaneously pray for a traffic jam to justify my urgency and for clear roads so I can escape this discomfort.
When we arrive at the terminal, we wait for another hour or so, and then drive aboard the boat with plenty of time to spare. I had been rushing everyone for no reason. But the tension predictably melts - these people’s love for me outweighs their annoyance with me, thankfully.
You get to know people well during these in-between moments of travel, the periods of transit when you’re waiting to arrive at the next destination or activity. These moments are ridden with impatience and idleness, two attributes that can breed conflict like clockwork. But I’ve found that time - and not even that much of it - smooths out small irritations quickly. I tend to want to hurry the process along, skip to speaking normally again, and rush the de-awkwardification of a situation, but that’s simply not how it works. You have no choice but to sit in the warm, temporarily distressing, liminal space - allowing the air to stale around you and your breath to shorten slightly - before you can get to the other side. I’ve always gotten to the other side though.
This small fire in transit was a touchy start to a weekend that I already knew would be emotional. The friction lit a small fuse, frayed my nerves a little bit, making all my feelings feel a bit more vivid, like I had taken a psychedelic. It was like that feeling after you cry, when the sun seems to shine a bit brighter, your blanket feels a bit softer, the quiet all a bit quieter. On the ferry, the cold wind nicks my skin like tiny knives on the upper deck. It’s always so jarring venturing back to Washington State after months of staring down flat Manhattan streets. Suddenly, it’s distant snowcapped peaks and sturdy evergreens dotting the land encasing the Salish Sea. I stare out at the water, searching for pockets of white water, evidence of orca whales, but have no such luck. I almost wish I didn’t grow up here so I didn’t take all of it for granted.
The whole weekend is in motion, in every sense. Weddings involve quite a bit of movement. Not only do you often have to travel to wedding destinations, but you must also move around at the event itself. You move from your ceremony seats to a photo area, to a cocktail hour, to a dinner table, to a dance floor. Up and down, in and out of seats and conversations. Accordingly, there’s often little room for privacy, as you catch up with old friends and family and attempt to quiet any physical or emotional achiness.
As soon as I catch a glimpse of the bride walking down the aisle, I’m in tears, and I’m attempting to subside these tears for the rest of the evening. I feel them come on with every step I take in my agonizing heels, with every lull in conversation with strangers, and each time I lose sight of my sisters. It’s impossible to place the cause of the crying on one thing - it’s likely a perfect storm of things anyway. Temporarily arrested from the mundanities of ordinary life, events like weddings allow for unexpected moments of reflection. The things that you push to the back of your mind have an opportunity to take precedence as you wait for the wine to be poured. As you wait for the cake to be sliced. As you stare at your feet while your sisters put their shoes on.
At an event where emotional nakedness is not only accepted but welcomed, I decide it’s okay for me to cry, even if the source of my tears wavers, bouncing between joy, self-obsessiveness, and existentialism. My sisters and I are always waiting for something to happen, but something is happening, and I’m ill-prepared. I often feel like I’m still waiting for big, important life ordeals to happen as they’re happening. I miss vacations before they even begin, I dread goodbyes right after hellos. I often feel like I’m walking along the periphery, never taking a seat in the center. Everything feels too fast and too temporary. Always moving through something, never staying.
Perhaps this is why I don’t mind the fact that our ferry home gets delayed for four hours the next day. My sisters, boyfriend, and I have no choice but to stay put for a second. We decide to drive around the island a bit and see what natural sights there are to marvel at. A fifteen-minute drive takes us to San Juan National Historical Park, where we admire the contrast of the bright blue sky and dark green trees. The mountains kiss the sea neatly on the horizon and rocky cliffsides bleed into pebble beaches. The water laps the rocks quietly, it’s all so quiet.
What sticks with me most from this jaunt isn’t this beautiful scenery, but the fifteen-minute drive from the ferry terminal. I recall the thickness of the air on the journey to the island and compare it with the peacefulness in the car now. I think about how unfortunate and wonderful it is that loving someone means loving all of them. It means submitting yourself to at least half as many awkward car rides as pleasant ones. It means sitting with them in transit - in motion - even more than you sit with them at the milestone events themselves.
It’s terrifying to let yourself be known in this way. But allowing yourself to be seen in in-between spaces - in your many incomplete, temporary, and disagreeable states of being - is the only way to truly be known. So I’ll sit in the car, when it’s awkward and when it’s pleasant. And I’ll allow people to see me cry at weddings. For all kinds of reasons.
For more on intimacy in liminal spaces, check out my article We’re Following Social Conventions Too Well.
This was a delight to read. It really is interesting, isn’t it? Always being so aware of time? How fast it moves and other times how slow, how you might be wasting it by doing nothing, how you might be burning it too quickly by doing too much? I really loved how you alluded to how these milestone moments are also made up of a million small, in-between moments. Imagine: the microphone being plugged in before a big, speech, the knife and plate being passed over before the cutting of the cake, the awkward struggle of uncorking a bottle of wine. Thank you so much for sharing this! x
So relateable !!! Great article Madison