By Karen Gonzalez-Videla

One: Ensure you live at least 1,000 miles away from that aunt who calls you every other hour to ask if you’ve finally found a man who glues you to his body at night like a glob of lotion. Take a plane to that town you saw on TV last week, the one that’s a couple of miles away from “Middle of Nowhere” national park and has less than 2,000 inhabitants. Rent a one-bedroom cabin. Check that it doesn’t come with a couch people can sleep on, and if it does, buy a chainsaw, cut it, shred it to pieces with a woodchipper, and toss the shreds in a nearby gully.

Two: When your aunt calls, she’ll scream into the phone “My sweet pea, how many hearts have you broken?” Tell her you broke fifteen. She’ll want to know whether you kicked one man in the balls so hard that he doubled over and vomited into his polished leather shoes, or if you yelled “You fucking pervert!” into his right ear so loud that he needed a cochlear implant. Say yes to everything. Add a little “you know me so well” and a snort disguised as a chuckle.

Three: Prepare a story about a man called Thomas Hunnington. He was born at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center at 6:27 in the evening. It was a breech birth, so the doctors cut him out of his mother’s womb like that tentacled alien in the 2012 Prometheus movie. The technical term is “caesarian section.” He scored more than 95% on every High School test he ever took, becoming every teacher’s shooting star. He once witnessed a physical fight between his Calculus and AP English Literature teachers because they both craved to name him subject leader, which, according to twenty-one years of school tradition, could not be awarded twice. He was offered a full-tuition scholarship at UC Berkeley, Harvard, Cornell, and UPenn. He chose UC Berkeley because he relished the aroma of his mom’s brioche and the tickling of his Persian cat’s whiskers at seven in the morning. He’s everything you’ve ever sought for in a man.

Four: Set an alarm at one-hundred percent volume for a time that simulates randomness and lovesick-despair, like 1:17 in the morning. Jog from your room to the kitchen at least four times (add more if you’re still not out of breath). Call your aunt. When she picks up, spurt out random details from Thomas’s backstory, like how he’s slept with his feet uncovered ever since his grandmother told him toes could suffocate, or how he taps his nose with his index finger whenever he’s thinking, or how he can only wink from his left eye, until she begs, “Calm down, sweet pea, cause I can’t understand anything.” Start again, but with less panting and word-spitting. Stay on the phone until the sun peeks through the blinds and bathes your sheets in gold. By the time you hang up, you should have mentioned the word “love” at least twelve times.

Five: Draft a memory in which you and Thomas bike for fifteen miles to a field of sunflowers in the early days of June. Your bike is pastel blue, and Thomas’s maroon with a white stain on the handlebar. It’s the first time you don’t clog your ears with alternative music because the creaking of Thomas’s feet on the pedals is enough to make flowers bloom before your eyes. Thomas announces there will be a biking race and claims the tallest sunflower in the field as the finish line. He screams “Go!” and the motion of your legs on the pedals becomes a windmill in the midst of a firm breeze. Thomas reaches the sunflower two seconds before you, but you grin as if you’ve just won an Olympic gold medal because this is the first time you’ve raced with a boy who hasn’t let you win.

Six: When your aunt asks how you remember these details, tell her that love does that to you, that it ingrains a memory into your brain like the lyrics of a childhood melody.

Seven: Wait some years, preferably one or two.

Eight: Set Tuesday aside to browse through wedding invitation templates on Minted.com. Find one that doesn’t require an image of you and Thomas holding hands by a dock as seagulls harmonize above the water. One of those with a circle of leaves around the bride and the groom’s names will work. Customize it so the circle sparkles with sunflower petals and seeds that intertwine around each other like legs on Valentine’s day. Listen to the forecast for your family’s town and set the wedding date as close to the next catastrophe as possible (hurricane, snowstorm, volcano eruption, worldwide migration of Albatrosses, anything). Order enough cards to invite your aunt, parents, grandparents, sisters, best friends, nephews, cousins, cousins twice removed, etc.

Nine: Seal the wedding invitations inside peach-pink envelopes with flowered stamps, mail them, and let the rush of arranging your first scam settle in.

Ten: Call your aunt and spell out your dream dress: A-line cut with a V-shaped neckline. Laced backside, so that your shoulder blades float in the cloth like leaves on water. Enoughpadding at the front to elevate the curves of your breasts without turning them into inflated balloons. And most importantly, silver sunflowers sprouting from the waistline and spiraling downwards in a series of braided vines.

Eleven: Your aunt, parents, grandparents, sisters, best friends, nephews, and cousins will call crying because the receptionist with the short black skirt at the airport spread her lips into a smile and said with a squeaky voice that planes are not allowed to fly in the midst of an impending hurricane/snowstorm/volcano eruption/worldwide migration of Albatrosses. Think of that scene in Lady Bird where Marion drives away from the airport and realizes she has let her daughter fly to college with nothing but a mother’s stoic face, how she turns the car around and runs into the terminal, how by the time she’s inside her daughter is already up on the clouds. Let mucus and tears culminate on your face as you mumble, “I know, I know. I just wish you could be there.”

Twelve: It’s your wedding day. Slip into the A-line cut dress with laces and padding and sunflowers and vines your aunt mailed as a gift for finding the man who will efface your last name with the effortlessness of a Staedtler Mars Plastic eraser on a Walmart-pencil mark. Bathe your face in Sephora foundation until your skin is as freckle-free as an antique porcelain doll. Paint your eyelids in shades of rose and your lips a nude beige. Cover the white spots on your nails with a coat of watermelon pink and adorn your hand with a silver bracelet to conceal the nudity of your wrist. Dig within the wiring of your brain for the notes of Richard Wagner’s Bridal Chorus you heard at your cousin’s wedding some years ago, walk outside the cabin and into the grass fields beyond it and breathe yourself in. 

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Karen Gonzalez-Videla is an undergraduate at the University of South Florida. She’s currently pursuing a degree in Psychology and Creative Writing, and she loves combining these two passions in her work. Although she writes about a variety of subjects, she focuses mostly on the immigrant experience and the exploration of one’s womanhood. Her work has been featured or is upcoming in Ghost Parachute, Sidereal Magazine, National Flash Fiction Day, Menacing Hedge and other places. You can find her on Twitter at @Gv12Karen.