I Will Follow You Into The Dark
MICK
Watching my two best friends get married was a truly awesome experience for me–and I didn’t mean in the way kids used the phrase nowadays.
Oh for goodness sake! When did I become such an old fart?
A while ago, I reckoned. At seventy-three I was well and truly in old geezer territory.
Michael used to joke that I’d be an old man long before he would, despite our twelve year age difference.
He was right of course, as he was about most things throughout our life. He never really became an old man.
“Tommy and Eric, you have now both made the declarations required by law and have made a solemn and binding contract with each other in the presence of your witnesses, guests and the registrar of marriages.”
The middle-aged woman in the trouser suit beamed at the two of them, and then addressed the room again.
“It therefore gives me great pleasure to pronounce you are now husband and husband.”
A roar of cheers that sounded much louder than the small congregation suggested erupted in the room.
“Hang on!” shouted Tommy. “Let me kiss him, for God’s sake.”
Raucous laughter rippled around the room, and the registrar finally said, “Congratulations! You may now kiss each other!”
Without any of the dignity and grace you might expect from two men in their early seventies, Tommy and Eric snogged each other’s faces off before one of The Frankies’ grandchildren shouted, “Get a room!”
Breaking away from more graphic than two old age pensioners should have engaged in, they held hands and started walking back out of the small room. Etta James’s “At Last” started playing on the sound system and another laugh danced around the crowd.
“Oh, that’s original,” Michael stage-whispered beside me, but he was smiling widely, and his eyes were glistening.
“Behave, you. Or I’ll leave you here,” I scolded.
With his hand to his heart, he performed mock outrage. “You wouldn’t do that to a poor helpless elderly man.”
“I bloody would.” I wouldn’t, and we both knew it. “And you’re not old.”
“Mick, light of my life, love of mine, if eighty-five isn’t old, what is?”
“You know what I mean.”
He did. I always joked that he never got old.
He was still the more fun one of the two of us.
He knew more about modern technology than I ever wanted to know.
If it wasn’t for his weak joints, he would have still jogged ten miles every day–a hobby he developed some time in the 1980s and never looked back.
He was the same joyful, kind, wonderful man I fell in love with sixty years ago.
He squeezed my hand, rubbing his finger over the platinum band on my ring finger, its twin gleaming on his.
We’d been ‘married’–or the closest thing to it for eight years.
As soon as civil partnerships between same-sex couples were recognised in law, we got married in a tiny ceremony with just Tommy and Eric as witnesses.
He was seventy-eight then and we were frightened that full marriage equality wouldn’t happen in his lifetime, so we’d settled with getting our civil partnership.
I’m glad that we did. It gave a sense of formality to our decades old union that gave me comfort.
When the law changed this year, we’d considered converting our partnership to a marriage, but it seemed disrespectful to what we’d had all this time, so we left it.
Waiting for the other guests to leave first, I stood up and disengaged the brakes on Michael’s wheelchair. He hated using the thing, but after he’d had a serious fall last winter, I told him it was the wheelchair or no G&Ts at the ceremony, and he’d relented.
Tommy and Eric’s wedding reception was in The Cherry Tree, where else?
We drank and chatted, and a few of us even got up and had a dance to the old songs we still loved.
I watched my closest friends–who’d been my real family for a long time–enjoy each other’s company, and celebrate love in all its forms.
Glancing over at the love of my life, I felt a serene feeling of peace come over me, even in all the noise and bustle of the party. After all this time, I could still shut out the rest of the world so it was just him and me.
We’d been so lucky, and I thanked God for each and every day we continued to share with one another. I didn’t know how long we had left, but at our age, every day was a gift. When we were younger, I’d worried how I’d cope if he died before me. How I’d carry on living with half of my heart gone.
I didn’t worry about that anymore. I knew we’d go at the same time.
Maybe not the exact same day, but I knew, like I knew my own name, that when he went, I would follow close behind.
Don’t ask me how I knew, I just did. There was no place in this world for me without him, and God knew that too.
I don’t mean anything awful like taking matters into my own hands.
I simply had faith that when He chose to take Michael, He’d take me too. We belonged together, him and me, in this world and the next, and that was just the way of it.
The End
Thank you for reading It’s In His Kiss, I hope you enjoyed Mick and Michael’s story.