Chapter Text
When it came time to marry Tom Buchanan, they found me in the stuffy back room of the church while bells rang merrily out over the rooftops in welcome. I was hyperventilating and clawing ineffectually at the zipper of my dress. A bridesmaid (Jordan, the only one I'd insisted on having, and therefore also the only one who hadn't been appointed to the wedding party by Tom) reached for me in a rare moment of emotional insight and unzipped it. One quick tug wrenched it open to the small of my back and I collapsed to the floor beside an older, abandoned altar, sobbing and overcome by a haunting loneliness as I clutched the gaping fabric to my chest. I vividly recall being struck by the sight of a bottle of communion wine nestled into the shadows of the altar: the only object in the room other than ourselves that was not covered in a layer of dust.
I left the church through a side door; I cannot imagine I would have escaped unmolested out the front. I don't know who spoke to Tom, or what they told him, or the words that were used to disperse the large crowd which had gathered to see us marry. I asked Jordan to run in and tell them all that Daisy had changed her mind, but to this day I haven't bothered asking if she actually did it. She may have had more decorum.
This was the rumored start to my illness, I heard later. I couldn't bring myself to care.
I slipped through the white ribboned hedges in the last pair of high-heeled shoes I would ever wear, the morning sun throwing my shadow westward across the lawn.
That night, I lifted a mostly empty bottle of communion wine in a toast to myself, to Tom’s continued absence, and to the bright sparkling future I felt sure I could now attain.
It had come to me over tea one morning, and it came fully formed. I was stirring sugar into my teacup—one eye on the newspaper at my elbow, some corner of my mind concerned with an issue we were having with the wedding caterer—and it dropped in from the sky, taking root as though it had always been there.
I'm a man.
It was an almost absent realization, the culmination of details collecting unnoticed until something small and unidentifiably innocuous tipped the scales, but it was one that—once realized—became a thought I turned over in my mind at nearly every waking moment, prodding it for weaknesses, insecurities. Faults.
There were none.
And so, four months after what would have been my wedding day, and two years after I first brought Jay Gatsby home, I entered a hospital with an overnight bag and several kinds of courage, leaving again a short time later with a flat, tender chest and the name Nick clenched victoriously between my teeth.