Wedding Season

The invitations pile up like autumn leaves, each envelope a small accusation written in calligraphy I can’t afford to answer.

“When’s your turn?” they ask at every reception, champagne making them bold enough to pry into the space where my plus-one should be.

I smile and shrug and change the subject to the bride’s dress, the flower arrangements, anything but the growing inventory of my loneliness that everyone seems so eager to audit.

My Instagram feed is a parade of engagement rings and save-the-dates, each post a gentle reminder that I’m falling behind in some race I never signed up for.

At night I wonder: Am I sad because I haven’t found the person who makes Sunday mornings feel like poetry,

or am I sad because everyone around me is disappearing into coupledom, leaving me standing on the shore of some promised land I’m not sure I even want to enter?

Is this grief for love I haven’t found, or grief for the version of myself that’s being slowly erased by their expectations—the one who was complete before she learned she was supposed to be half of something bigger?

Maybe I’m mourning not the absence of a wedding ring, but the death of the belief that I was enough exactly as I am,

standing here in my own skin, whole and unhalved, while the world keeps asking when I’ll finally begin my real life with someone else.