I didn’t want to be there. I fucking hate weddings. Even if this one was taking place on a palmetto-choked island off the coast of Georgia, and I was standing barefoot on warm, velveteen grass on the edge of dusk. And because Abinet invited me to his wedding, I fucking hated him too. Irrespective of whether I was the Best Man or not.

There is something kind of repulsive about how orchestrated weddings are, and how little they have to do with the love being celebrated by pomp and circumstance, which is in turn governed by a set of social and cultural norms not of one's own making. I had been more of an idealist before, about love and marriage, but my own infidelity fostered the development of a healthy cynicism in me. And I had been delightfully single ever since. 

If I had any talent, I'd explain myself as an anarchist artist type who has rejected "form" in all its manifestations. I’d challenge all cultural norms as a form of spiritual enslavement, putting the emphasis on form over substance. But, alas, I am nothing more than a really bitter, disagreeable pseudo-professional with an undersized life resume and an oversized ego.

Or maybe all this was just the groggy after-effects of the hangover pounding at the insides of my skull.  The previous night, we all had a bottle each of some bitter brown liquid that had one of the other groomsmen, Mikias, pissing blood around three in the morning. He left the hotel suite saying he was going to take care of it and called us around ten the following morning from Las Vegas. This fact wouldn’t be too notable, save for the fact that we’d all been drinking in a hotel suite in a Best Western just outside of Savannah, Georgia.

Cutty was standing in for him. We are not exactly sure who Cutty is, but he somehow made it into our suite last night with a bag of fruit and a megaphone, befriending us via speeches about the value of anti-oxidants and how monkeys should be taught capitalism (apparently, they are all socialists). The fact that Cutty showed up for the wedding today in the frilly peach prom dress and ill-applied lipstick made him instantly my hero given my afore-mentioned problem with the contrived formality of weddings. Thankfully, Abinet and Marta exchanged “I dos” before Cutty pulled out his megaphone and started exhorting everyone in a loud voice to eat the rich, apparently having abandoned his capitalist bearings after an unscheduled consultation with a bottle of rum that had been ear-marked for the reception.

Damn, my head hurt, even from just thinking. Shit. Picture time: smile. I pat Abinet on the back for the umpteenth time and we exchange vague glances. Some would call it a knowing glance.  Except I don't know what a "knowing glance" is. Then his trademark smile-smirk. It conveyed that painfully enviable confidence he had. He didn’t care or worry about anything; meanwhile I’m popping Xanax every time I go to Wal-Mart because I don’t know which laundry detergent to choose. Only ten hours ago, he'd given me an alcohol-sloppy version of the same smile just before he was smothered by a couple of meaty hookers slathered in bad make-up and cheap perfume.

The reception was taking place on a beautiful plantation.  For the sake of irony, we hired an all-white catering company. The sun had just begun to set and, perhaps the result of high tide and a stiff breeze, I could smell the sea salt in the air.  It was so thick that I was sure that I could season a bland plate of rice by holding it up at just the right angle. And, thankfully, the mosquitoes seemed to have given up on fighting the breeze and had gone off in search of still air. I grabbed a Corona out of one of the many coolers surrounding the main veranda and walked over to a large, especially sad-looking weeping willow tree.  Feeling corny, I began searching out the sunset. And feeling horny, I started checking out Marta’s younger sister.

"Does that have any meat products in it?" Sara, Moona's seven year old daughter asked from behind me as I stared out into open space.  Moona was one of the singers in the band playing at the wedding, and her daughter, like her, was a militant vegan. She was looking at the beer.

"I think it’s made out of cow sweat," I responded, taking a long sip to provide some kind of misguided point.

"Ewwwww," she said scrunching up her nose.  Poor kid, I thought.  You know, I look at this beautiful tree and think, "What a nice tree." She looks at the same tree and thinks, "Lunch."

“Mommy doesn’t know why she’s here,” Sara said pulling at a tree branch.

“What do you mean?” I asked taking another sip.

“It’s not right. Nothing about this is right, Mommy said.”

Maybe Sara was right. It was a strange fate that brought Abinet and Marta together and allowed them to have this wedding here, so far from everything Ethiopian. They were two people brought together against their will almost, the result of four horrific tragedies. 

Abinet’s parents were farmers who loved the rain almost as much as they loved God. But, perhaps too much of anything is never a good thing. Abinet's parents were killed when their house in Ethiopia was demolished by a mudslide during an especially rainy spring.

The same day that several thousand pounds of mud flattened and suffocated Abinet’s parents, Marta's parents were on that Ethiopian Airlines plane that crashed near the Comoros Islands after being hijacked a few years ago.  Her father, an ECA official, was on his way to Dakar for business and had sprung for a ticket for his wife to join him.  It was the first time she had ever set foot on a plane; she had always been too afraid of what may happen. She was finally convinced by the fact that her husband had flown some 500,000 miles over the course of his career without incident. Locals had reported that she was alive until the sharks came. Her mother also hated the beach.

Both Abinet and Marta received calls within minutes telling them the news. Both were driving at the time. And both their cars smashed into one another seconds after hearing the news, in the decidedly unsymbollic intersection of Columbia Pike and Glebe Road.  They wept and held each other while their cars steamed and leaked. They have been together ever since.

She explained and forgave the fact that Abinet slept around on her constantly with a combination of cognitive dissonance and some sort of mystical numerology mumbo-jumbo.  She added up various numbers of the date their parents died, their birth dates and threw in some other arbitrary numbers -- her high school locker combo? her pin number? It was never clear -- and came up with a figure. She then consulted various Judeo-Christian mystics who had translated the name of God from letters into a 2,340 digit number.  She said that the number she came up with equaled the part of God's numerical name that meant love. It was as simple as that.

You can't fight fate, she would tell me often, especially not when it comes in such a clear and unambiguous form.  When they were together, she would tell me, the love was so obvious and pure that she could feel the presence of her parents and everyone else who she knew, loved and lost. She didn't love him. She needed him for love.  And since it was all so arbitrary, I never found myself able or willing to convince her otherwise.

Abinet's love for her was more desperate. He was handsome, feckless, but, up until he met her, hopeless. She gave him hope because she forgave him for being himself.  Or at least, she never judged him.  Not for the fact that he hadn't seen his seven-year-old daughter for five years prior to today, where he convinced Sara to chase butterflies so he wouldn't have to talk to her.  And the gonorrhea had become something of a joke to them after all these years. Marta had indisputable proof that together, they were love.  And, if after all they had been through, she could still believe that, he knew that anything was possible.

Abinet comes tearing around the corner of the main house, shivering. He grabs my arm and we run around back, in a door, through a small hall and into a bathroom. Its covered in powder, and Moona’s clothes are on the floor.

Words are exchanged between us. A lot of “shits,” “fucks,” missing verbs. Sara’s name over and over again. We can’t figure out where Moona is. Is she running around? Naked? Someone would have seen her. Where? Abinet even looks down the toilet bowl, as if Moona may have drowned herself in it. Abinet grabs the powder. “Moona?”

We taste it. Its not coke. More like sand.

“She loved me completely,” Abinet says crying and pounding the powder. Sara’s giggling distracted us as she ran by with some other guests’ kids.

We never heard from Moona again. Or Cutty for that matter. We eventually convinced ourselves – or realized? – that Cutty was just a figment of our imagination. Moona was taking a break from it all. There were too many questions none of us wanted answered.

Exactly one year later – on Sara’s birthday -- Marta left Abinet and Sara. There was no note, really. Rather a piece of paper with some mathematical scribbling involving dates, with Sara’s birthday underlined. And a six-digit number. And the words “means emptiness.”