Q+U Wedding

Happy New Year! Wow. What a time. Last year, in 2020, I spent a lot of time reflecting on my past experiences and how they've shaped me. I thought back to kindergarten. That was the year we learned all the letters of the alphabet. Truly life changing. At the end of that lesson plan, we participated in a tradition, a ritual, that was an effort led by our teacher, Morah Kim (went to a Jewish day school, 'morah' means teacher). This tradition was called the Q+U Wedding. The boys and girls were paired up, made to dress in tiny suits and tiny white dresses, and would walk down the aisle of the school's chapel. There was some sort of ceremony and something about how Q and U always go together. My class had an odd number of members. Thus, I walked down the aisle as part of a throuple, with my two best friends at the time, let's call them Abraham and Sarah. It felt completely normal at the time and I was perfectly content to marry a boy and a girl at once, but looking back on it, the whole thing is very weird and uncomfortable and maybe problematic. I think most of my classmates have blocked it out of their memories at this point, but I remember it vividly. I remained best friends with Abraham and Sarah that year and we remained close until both of them moved out of state. I lost touch with Sarah and stayed close with Abraham throughout the years. It's just so weird. Sometimes I think maybe that's where part of my inferiority complex comes from - I was the second wife, the third wheel, the non-letter next to the Q and the U. Seriously, what was I if not a Q or a U? Was I a second U? A second Q? What am I?