So, I’m getting married in April.

My fiancé and I have reached the point in the process where we can envision what our wedding day will look like.

We will awake, no doubt after a night of too little sleep, dress casually and go decorate the reception hall. We’ll separate and probably not see each other again until It’s Time.

That’s what I’ll hear, right before my father escorts me into the church and down the aisle.

It’s at that moment in my visualization that I realize it’s been years since I held my daddy’s hand.

I’ve kissed him hello and hugged him goodbye, as any Southern-reared woman would, but I can’t remember the last time I held his hand.

I remember distinctly how his hands feel, how they seem to swallow mine, how rough the ridges on his palms feel. But I must’ve been a child the last time he held me in any sense.

I see him on average once a year. Our visits, at best, are a wary meeting of adversaries whose grasp of a mutual language has too many words of battle and too few of love.

We don’t know each other, really, and yet we know each other perfectly. It’s the intimacy of enemies.

Still, when It’s Time, he will come for me where I wait in a room across the courtyard from the church. He will extend his hand, and I will take it.

I can envision that much.

I’m too battle weary, though, to hope for more.

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