the wedding video

circa 2006. silver CD in black protective case. duct tape label.

The Horizon of Love IX by Yuwantha Yasas

During a visit to Sri Lanka in 2019, I inherited my parents’ wedding video. My mom wanted no part in its safekeeping (It depresses me, she said), and my grandmother, the original owner, was running out of room. I was next in line.

I borrowed my mom’s slow Dell computer to watch it. Sitting on the big green couch with the trees outside casting shadows on the laptop screen, I pointed out various relations in their younger bodies while Nassir (LOML) peered over my shoulder. (He’s since had to rewatch this video countless times. He must really like me or something.) My mom offered commentary from the dining table: I fainted during the Mass; they edited it out. We didn’t know half these people. She remembered the scenes without needing to look.

I watched it again a year later, in the middle of the first wave of Covid. My roommate and I had already spent 40 consecutive days in our living room “going to the club” (turning off the lights and playing Spotify from the TV), day-drinking on the stoop, and making elaborate dinners solely to post on a collaborative meal IG. We had almost run out of things to do when I remembered the video.

It opens with scrolling text announcing that, yes, we’re about to watch my parents’ wedding unfold. The opening credits list their parents, their grandparents, and their home addresses. The videographer, like me, did things for the archive, I guess.

Then, a photo of my mom and dad, smiling in their suit and sari, appears onscreen. They look adorable, actually. My dad is giving Italian Mob vibes. (Sorry if that’s cultural appropriation.) When I look at him, my brother’s mischievous face looks back at me. God really hit Copy-Paste on Kid #3. My mom is wearing her reddish-pink lipstick shade, a heavily beaded sari, and a dramatic updo that I can tell, even sitting twenty-five years away, that she hates.

In classic Colombo fashion, the opening scene is fifteen minutes of B-roll of the Hilton Hotel. When we finally meet my mom, she’s in the bridal suite while my grandmother pins a veil over her hair. She looks coyly at the camera, and every time I watch, I lock eyes with her across all those years. My grandfather stands at the door, waiting to take her to the church.

We meet my dad at the church steps. He ambles out of the car with a group of friends, a grin on his face. He kisses his father, then his mother, on the cheek and walks down the aisle. His vibe is giving that time my brother and his friends walked into my birthday party imagining a rager when we were actually just sitting in a circle talking.

The video continues on for two more hours, and if you don’t skip, you’ll enjoy barely edited footage of friends, family, and absolute strangers moving about the day. With no tact or warning, the ‘80s and ‘90s ballads will give way to someone speaking or coughing. The terrible production quality is kind of iconic when you remember someone paid good money for this.

While we watched together in our living room, I told Hinali all the lore. And there’s a whole story there. About my mom and dad, around my age at the time, stumbling through the show of a big Sri Lankan wedding. About the camera zooming in on their entangled hands, a gesture of affection I haven’t seen in years. About a love long since gone and a new kind of thing in its place. There’s definitely something about how my siblings and I rewatch the video as if we don’t know how it all ends.

But really, the interesting part of the wedding video isn’t what’s on the disk. (Although, if you’re curious, we can watch it together). It’s the fact that it still exists at all. My parents have been separated for twenty years. When they were still together, my sister and I were watching the video together on VHS. The version I inherited is a CD, digitized by my grandmother sometime in 2006, two years after my parents had already separated. It’s protected by a black case, a swath of masking tape running along the top. On it, in her careful, cursive lettering, my grandmother inscribed my parents’ names, their wedding date, and the video’s run time. (She’s another person who does things for the archive).

Digitizing things onto CDs was all the rage at the time, but it required a little tech-savvyness. Nana would have had to take the VHS to a specialist who could transfer all the data for her. At the time, my mom was probably going through the hardest part of settling into single womanhood. And there was Nana, burning the memory of the event that started it all into the grooves of a CD. My grandmother, watching the marriage come undone in real time, decided that the wedding should still be preserved.

To this day, when my grandmother introduces my mom to a friend, she’ll let them know she was married to so and so. It annoys my mom, but she’s come to accept it as something that’s important to my grandmother. To her, being married and divorced is better than never being married at all.

My mom, on the other hand, thinks her marriage was great until it wasn’t, and she has sworn never to marry again. And still, any time she sees a gesture of affection between me and Nassir— oiling his hair, holding his hand, bringing him a coffee to his desk— she’ll ask us, And when are you two getting married? Sri Lankans love weddings. Sri Lankan Catholics love marriage.

Sometime in the mid-2010s, lifetimes before we were making a life together, Nassir and I were driving down the Southern State Parkway pretending we were just friends. We spent every free moment together, driving to Witches Brew or the mall or Shake Shack. Sometimes we’d just park in the 7/11 parking lot and talk. If it was the summer, we’d drive to the beach and stop by Diner by the Sea for milkshakes filled with sprinkles and brownies that got stuck in the straw. He was always putting me on to music that I’d secretly save on Spotify. Frank Ocean was always playing in his car.

It was somewhere during this time, on one of these drives, that I heard Frank Ocean’s American Wedding. The lyrics read like poetry, and it samples an Eagles song that I grew up listening to. Friends have said that this should play at our wedding— the unexpected pairing of Frank Ocean and the Eagles representing our coming together. But American Wedding is not a wedding song. It’s a divorce song.

It's an American wedding
They don't mean too much
But we were so in love

When I heard it, I was moved by the idea that weddings can be momentary expressions of love and still not last forever. And maybe that’s fine?

When Frank Oceans sings, We had an American wedding, Now what's mine is yours, American divorce, I hear foreverness. The act of being married, even for a short time, is an entangling of two people through time and history. I’m probably being dramatic, but I feel like you can replace “being married” with “being best friends” or “being obsessed with One Direction,” and it would still work. When we decide something is real for a moment, it’s real forever.

Even with all its baggage, the wedding video sits inconspicuously in my living room. It’s surrounded by books, a pack of UNO cards, and a packet of toothpicks Nassir’s mom left after a party. Nassir always asks, Why is the wedding video right here, and I never have a convincing answer. I like that it’s within reach. That I can find it any time a sibling wants to watch it. It feels like a reminder that it all happened once.

I’m a grown-up about my parent's divorce. And I’ve always been that way. They are simply better apart. But that won’t stop me from romanticizing everything that the wedding promised: a life full of love. The people in the video are not my parents— yet. Their lives were still opening up before them. Every path was one they could take. When I watch them in that moment, everything feels possible for them. And I’m always left with a softness for those two young people who were living their lives for the first time.

Maybe, my grandmother and I have the same instinct. We’re keeping the wedding video safe not to preserve something that’s gone but to honor something that was there. I’m now older than my parents were in the video, and I’m thinking about my own wedding sometime soon. I wonder what my kids will think about me. I wonder what they’ll say about us— me and Nassir— holding hands down the aisle. I wonder if they’ll know that we were once two teenagers driving down the highway, pretending to be friends. I wonder what they’ll choose to keep safe. Maybe they’ll have this same CD, an ancient artifact by then, somewhere on a side table of their own.