This white dress reminds me of that day…..!!!
Exactly twenty two years today.
Twenty-two years since the day I lost my husband—the one I had waited for, dreamed about, stood next to in that chapel with trembling hands and hope in my heart.He was gone before the cake had even been cut, before we had even said our "I Do's, before we had even had a chance to even look at each other in all the wedding finery.
He was gone.A car accident. A wrong turn. A speeding driver. One call. That’s all it took for everything to splinter.
I still remember how my veil felt that morning—light and full of promise. And how it stuck to my tears that night, when I was too numb to scream and too stunned to move.
And I remember him.
No, not him—not the one I lost.
The other him.
The one who stood just a few feet away in the crowd that day, wearing a navy-blue tie and eyes that knew sorrow in the way some people know poetry: deeply, fluently, as if it was part of them.His name was Aidan. He was my husband’s best friend.
And a week later, he asked me to marry him.
Not out of love. Not out of pity. But out of something strange and selfless that I didn’t understand at the time—something like responsibility wrapped in grief, or a need to protect what his best friend had cherished most.
“I’m not saying we pretend,” he said gently. “I’m saying maybe we figure it out. Together. One day at a time.”
I didn’t say yes right away. Who would? But his presence became a steady thing in the chaos—he drove me to the lawyer’s office, took care of things I couldn’t face, left soup at my door and sat silently on the porch when I couldn’t speak.
And somewhere between winter’s silence and spring’s hesitant bloom, I realized I looked for him in each and every moment.
We married quietly, two months after the funeral. No white dress. No guests. Just city hall, a bouquet of lilacs, and a vow we both barely knew how to mean.
Love didn’t come in fireworks.
It came in cups of tea passed wordlessly. In standing side by side while painting the living room walls. In the comfort of his jacket on my shoulders in February.
Aidan liked books—worn-out, secondhand ones with notes in the margins. He loved midnight walks in the city, indie music, and black coffee that he drank with an unreadable expression.
I liked fresh flowers on the kitchen table, sketching people on the subway, and thunderstorms that rattled the windows.
We got to know each other slowly.
We fought, sometimes. About things that didn’t matter and things that did. Like how I still kept my first husband’s picture on the mantle. Or how Aidan never said the word “love” until two years in.
But somehow, we built something.
Not perfect. Not storybook. But real.
He taught me that love isn’t always fireworks—it’s also the quiet certainty that someone will be there when the world burns down.
And I taught him that you can grieve and still grow. That healing isn’t betrayal.
Now, I sit in our apartment—22 years later—with the sounds of New York humming outside the window. I hold a white dress in my lap, the one our daughter will wear tomorrow when she walks down her own aisle.
And I think of that day.
Of the loss.
Of the beginning that came from an ending.
Of the man who didn’t have to love me, but chose to anyway.
And of how, in the long run, that kind of love might just be the truest kind there is.
Today, the apartment smells like cinnamon. He’s in the kitchen, humming a tune he probably heard once in a bookstore and never forgot, wearing his ridiculous “World’s Okayest Husband” apron. I bought it as a joke one year and somehow, it became his Saturday uniform.
We don’t always talk about the beginning. It was fragile. Clumsy. More silence than words, more fear than hope. But over the years, we learned to tell the story—not as a tragedy, but as something strange and sacred.
I remember our first real trip together, three years in—upstate New York, fall. I had just started to draw again. He found a tiny cabin on a lake that smelled like pine and old stone, and I brought my sketchbook, unsure if I could still trust my hands to hold beauty after holding so much loss.
That weekend, I drew him without him knowing. Sitting on the porch, barefoot, reading "The Brothers Karamazov" for the fifth time. There was a line he underlined in red: “The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.”
I asked him what he was living for.
He looked up, squinted at the trees, and said, “I think…this.”
Us.
It wasn’t a grand declaration. It wasn’t fireworks. It was just the truth. And from that moment, something shifted in me.
I stopped measuring him against the ghost of someone I had once loved. I stopped feeling like I had to choose between past and present.
We weren’t pretending anymore.
We were becoming.
He’s always loved the small, quiet things. A perfectly made sandwich. A poem that doesn’t rhyme. Clean socks. Rain on the windows.
And I’ve always been more restless. I crave movement, color, crowded spaces, unspoken stories.
But somehow, he makes the world feel calm. And I—he says—I make it feel alive.
We’ve raised two beautiful children in this city, in a two-bedroom apartment that’s seen broken dishes, long hugs, slammed doors, birthday candles, exam tears, quiet Sunday mornings, his heart attack and subsequent recovery and more love than I ever thought I was capable of offering.
Tomorrow, my eldest is getting married, wearing my dress.
It fits her like a dream—clean, white, timeless. And when I zipped it up for her this morning, my fingers trembled.
Not because I was sad.
But because I realised how far we’ve come.
How this dress, once soaked in heartbreak, now carries so much life.
And as I watched her twirl, laughing, eyes sparkling in the mirror, I saw him standing in the doorway. Aidan. Gray at the temples now, glasses sliding down his nose.
He looked at her the way he looked at me 22 years ago when I agreed to marry him—uncertain, terrified, but full of a kind of reverence I’ll never be able to name.
Later tonight, we’ll sit on the balcony, the city lights flickering like stars at our feet. And maybe I’ll reach for his hand and whisper, “Thank you for loving me when I didn’t know how to be loved.”
And he’ll probably say something like, “Thank you for not running the other way.”
Because love, real love—the kind that grows slowly, roots deep, survives winters and still blooms in spring—it doesn’t shout.
It stays.
And after 22 years, I know that’s more than enough.
DoubleSpeak 