What Comes After | ✔️

Chapter 12

August 5th

What a day! There's just so much that happened.

A couple of hours after I finished writing yesterday's entry, May practically lost all of her steam and went to sleep at what I felt like was eleven at night. Mom and Dad spent most of the night preparing the wedding, both of them sleeping sometime after midnight, which was when I went to sleep.

They woke up early in the morning to just set everything up and move furniture around to make space. It was snowing outside, small gray flakes of ash from volcanoes hundreds of miles away were falling on the dead grass. Who knew that a summer wedding would turn into what feels like a winter wonderland? Who even expected that a wedding would happen?

Mom and Dad cleared out an empty space in the middle of the living room and brought the dining room chairs for us to sit in. We had some string up lights for Christmas that haven't been used since second or third grade when we stopped setting up the Christmas tree, partially because the last time we did this, no one bothered to take down the Christmas tree until the middle of summer.

May and I also cut out flowers from paper and pasted it onto a banner that would be behind where Mira and Leon would exchange their vows. I also found some green yarn and twisted it around the chairs and pasted the remaining paper flowers on the chairs because we might as well make use of our resources. We were going to have a very floral wedding, which was pretty ironic since all the flowers are dead from the ashfall.

Grandma and Grandpa did all the cooking in the morning for the wedding, taking out cans and bags of flour. "But what about the whole conserving food thing?" I asked Mom.

"We'll figure it out later," Mom said. "It's a wedding. We can figure out how we're going to make it past afterwards."

The delicious aroma of what Grandma and Grandpa were cooking wafted through the air as they cut scallions and scattered them on flat cakes of flour before pan-frying them, and all of a sudden, I thought of something. "Is it alright if I bring a friend over?" I asked.

"You'd probably have to ask Mira about that," Mom said. "She'll probably say yes though but ask her just in case. You don't want to mess up her day."

Dad called Mom's name after that, probably to help him with finding some wedding gifts for Leon. We've got a mountain of old vintage things in and around the garage, hiding in old cardboard boxes. Dad moved some of them around and into the closet by the garage when we made space for the greenhouse and wood storage pile, so that's probably why Dad was calling for her.

I walked towards Mira's room. It was closed, and I didn't want to catch her off guard, so I knocked on the door.

"If it's you, Leon, I told you that visiting the bride before the wedding is bad luck," she shouted.

"Well, luckily for you, this is not Leon," I said. "Can I come in?"

"Yeah," she said. "Just wait a sec."

There was some shuffling of footsteps before she opened the door. She was dressed in a long, white gown that swept across the ground, trailing a couple of feet behind her. Her hair was done all fancy and she was smiling.

"So, how do I look?" she asked.

"You look fine," I said.

"Only fine?" she asked.

"You look great," I said.

"I feel terrible," she said. "And this dress is so long that every time that I stand up, I feel like I'm going to trip over it and my makeup is smudged and—"

"Is something wrong?" I asked.

She sighed. "I'm so nervous."

"You'll be fine," I said. "You've done scarier things before. How bad can a wedding be compared to bungee jumping at one of those amusement parts? A wedding should be a piece of cake."