"Small Catastrophes In The Courtship Of Edwin Brash: A Minor Key In A Major World"

From the Memoirs of Mr. Edwin Brash
Composed in the Year of Our Lord 1795, Bath, England

“I had hoped the bouquet would speak where I could not. Instead, it sat in silence, much like I do when sincerity is required.

She told me the man she now loves is a violinist. A gifted one. Sensitive hands. Sad eyes. She said he once played a sonata so tender it summoned color from a blind man’s memory.

In comparison, I once compared her laugh to a wounded bird and insisted it was a compliment.

I once gave her food poisoning on her birthday.

I once asked her father for her hand and mispronounced her name in the same breath.

I once tried to write her a sonnet and rhymed “eternal” with “kernel.” Twice.

I once kissed her hand and called her by her mother’s name.

I once cried in front of her and blamed it on a draft. There was no draft.

I once gifted her a locket with a picture of me, looking unsure.

I once quoted Shakespeare to her in bed. She left before I finished the first Act.

I once told her I understood women, then immediately asked if she was “mad or just quiet.”

I once played her a song I wrote on the harpsichord. She asked if it was satire.

I once gave a toast in her honor and quoted from a novel where the heroine dies unloved and insane.

I once told her she reminded me of my mother. I said it with confidence. I regret everything.

I once wrote our initials on a tree and misspelled them. She noticed. I pretended not to.

I once gave her a journal with quotes from famous women. I’d written over most of them.

I once told her “you look tired, but in a poetic way.”

I once gifted her a handkerchief with my initials embroidered on it. Not hers. Mine.

I once told her I loved her laugh, then immediately asked her to keep it down.

The comparisons to her new love are not flattering, but they are accurate.”

She was to marry the violinist. Edwin learned of it on a Tuesday, a day whose quiet, suffocating dullness he felt suited the occasion with cruel accuracy.

He attended her wedding. He arrived late, overdressed, and breathlessly apologetic. He offered the groom a novel she had once lent him, heavily annotated, her name still penciled faintly on the inside cover.
He then, quite accidentally, spilled a generous amount of red wine across the guestbook. When he signed it, he wrote, “To eternal love from the colonel, spelled correctly this time.”

He toasted the couple from a lonely, dimly lit corner of the reception hall, quoting a line that was not Shakespeare but which he, quite confidently, claimed was. She smiled with practiced politeness.

It was, in every way, a disaster.

For Edwin, love is not a battlefield. It’s more like a crowded café where he repeatedly knocks over his own water and then tries to soak up the mess with a wet napkin. He does not learn. He does not triumph. But he does chronicle. And perhaps therein lies his only true romance.

Original Oil Painting On Linen Canvas

Painting Size: 36" x 48"

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