The girl with the mousy hair and me got married on this day, 21st December, many years ago. The fall of the Berlin wall was a novelty back then, and 9/11 was still a good few years into the future.
The world was just different. There was hope for the future.
I remember that day vividly. It was sunny but cold -very, very cold in that stone church with a stone floor. I was standing up next to the bride in my cheap flimsy tuxedo, wearing cheap flimsy leather shoes bought in the tropics. None of that gear could protect me from the cold weather, or from the cold sweat going down my back.
I was very afraid, because I knew at that moment -before the priest even finished the ceremony- that I had been trapped in an unhappy marriage.
And unhappy it was. The girl with the mousy hair -let’s call her Li- was an intensely unhappy creature. Born to a Spanish couple, the girl was very pretty indeed.
Her sense of fashion was somewhere in-between an Eastern European stewardess from the 1970s, and a star in an Italian soft-porn film, with a dash of Jessica Rabbit.
Li had a curvy body, with a lovely Celtic face with green eyes and … mousy hair. Like many women of that ancestral origin, she was slightly plump.
But she did not think she was very attractive, and did very little to help herself: she ate atrociously bad, smoked stinky Ducados cigarettes, had weight issues, had body image issues, had daddy issues and mommy issues too.
Intimacy was awful with Li -she probably was carrying a lot of trauma that she never worked on. Lights would be off -so that she would not have to see me seeing her- and she would do the minimum conscious effort to be part of the moment.
Her cooking was awful. Her personality was awful. I never thought I would despise someone with so much conviction as I despised her.
We were just not compatible at all, not even as friends.
I divorced her after 10 months, and after this many years, never questioned my decision.
It was the right thing to do. I do not miss at all the girl with the mousy hair.