In June, while prepping for an egg-freezing procedure, I was hopped up like a chicken on hormones and I was crying about everything: I wanted babies immediately, my cat got angry with me, I wanted to solve all of my boyfriend’s childhood trauma, I missed my mom …

Annie, my best friend, decided to get me out of the house. As we thrifted in Los Feliz, we found a gorgeous, ivory, vintage dress that either gave pilgrim vibes or cool courthouse wedding dress chic.

My estrogen-soaked brain latched onto the latter. Mind you, I am divorced and don’t want to get married again. But shelling out $85 cash for this perfect, pilgrim/courthouse dress was the only right decision in that moment.

“Please don’t do that to Graham,” Annie said, knowing about my boyfriend’s and my decision around marriage and clearly disapproving of the style of the dress.

But it was too late. My eyes and heart inflated with this glittery new idea, already imagining a beaded dress underneath my new courthouse fit that I would strip off for a sexy reveal right after the four-person ceremony and just before we went dancing downtown with all our friends.

“Too late,” I said grinning back, my joy as oversize as my new dress.

Afterward, I wanted to walk to Figaro Bistrot, the French restaurant down the way, for a celebratory glass of wine.

“I don’t endorse this,” Annie said, referring to my purchase and my drinking wine while on the hormone injections.

“My kids will just grow up to love wine a bit more!” I said, giddy to have a break from home and the tornado of emotions that had been haunting me all day.

Fortunately, she let me have only a couple sips. We sat and chatted about marriage, my possibly newfound feelings around it, her separation from her own husband, and dear God, how insufferable the L.A. heat wave was becoming.

We sauntered over to a sushi dinner at Roji Sushi (I was on hormone shots, not pregnant!) and ended the night shortly thereafter. A perfect girls’ afternoon.

I fell asleep that night curious about my shifting feelings around marriage. Was it just the hormones? Was it real? And if so, what would this mean to my angel boyfriend whom I deeply loved, but had mutually bonded with over not wanting marriage?

Our friends were always surprised at our distaste for nuptials. To them, it seemed like the next natural step for two people so in love, but it always made perfect sense to us.

My divorce had unfolded five years prior, and Graham was a child of divorce. Neither of us felt particularly protected by the law of marriage, and both of us had trauma around the crumbling reality of it.

I knew I’d never again want to put someone I loved in the position of having to go through an extensive legal process simply because we realized we weren’t each other’s person. I knew from experience that could take years to find out.

Graham knew that saying forever didn’t necessarily mean forever, and that the result of that promise snapping could break a family irreparably.

Neither of us were interested in bringing the law into our sacred love, which was charged with more laughter and sweetness than, I think, either of us had imagined possible for ourselves.

And yet I now had a wedding dress in my closet. What did this mean?

I slipped out of bed to peer into the brown bag holding my new undercover possession when I suddenly realized I didn’t remember bringing the bag home.

In fact, I definitely did not have it.

The only place I would have put it was in my coat closet behind my other old wedding dress that I still needed to sell, and it definitely was not there. A panic flushed through me.

Did Graham find it? Did I lose it? Maybe it was just in Annie’s car. Did I have it when we went for sushi? I didn’t remember having it there. Did I drop it on the sidewalk?

I had no idea where my precious dress was.

I started sobbing, losing my idea of a new marriage before I could even fully conjure it again.

“It’s just the shots!” I told myself. “You don’t want to get married. You already decided that. You bought baby clothes the last time you froze your eggs. This is just your new iteration of that. Losing this dress is the universe telling you something. It’s time to go to sleep. You don’t want to get married.”

Shortly after my egg-freezing procedure, Graham and I went to Europe for a month. While meeting his family, while sipping wine in front of the Eiffel Tower, while feeling the bend of his body curl into mine at night, I wondered where my dress was. Was she lonely? Did someone else find her? Maybe she was meant to adorn someone else for some other occasion. Maybe she wasn’t meant to be mine.

Everyone thought Graham was going to propose in Paris. We laughed, knowing it wasn’t our goal. It wasn’t! And yet when we got back, I wondered if there was any hope of finding my dress. It had been over a month, and I couldn’t imagine someone wouldn’t steal such a beautiful piece if found. (But Annie could.)

I drove to Los Feliz intent on success. I walked from Skylight Books to Roji Sushi and the Little Knittery to Figaro. I gave the staff at each of them my sob story, lamenting over my lost wedding dress. I couldn’t even blame the hormones for making me act like this. I really wanted to find my dress.

When I got to Figaro, the last place to look on my list, I burst out crying. Did I really want to get married?

The poor server desperately dug for his life in the lost and found cabinet. Between my sobs and his sighs, the other servers tucked past, wondering what was happening but not really wanting to deal with the crazy person watching their co-worker badger-dig into the bowels of this cabinet.

There came a point where it felt like the polite thing to do was say, “Well, thank you so much for looking! It clearly isn’t here, and that’s OK. I appreciate you trying.”

But I couldn’t. I watched him dig. And dig. I sniffled. He dug. When suddenly, from the depths of this cave, he pulled out a very crumpled, brown paper bag with soft, ivory fabric peaking out between the twine handles. “It wouldn’t be this small would —”

“Oh my God, you found it!”

I leaped at the poor guy with a desperate relief deeply unwarranted for this situation. He shriveled away like my cats do when I smother them. I’m pretty sure my tears soaked his shoulder blade.

I sang along to Hilary Duff’s new album “Luck… or Something” all the way home, and carefully and lovingly, I tucked the brown bag holding my beloved dress into my coat closet, safely behind my other old wedding dress. For some reason, this felt right.

“Why were you in Los Feliz today?” Graham asked me later that afternoon. We share locations, and I told him I’d be home. Busted.

“Oh, I just lost something.” I didn’t have any story prepared.

“Oh, when? Did you find it?”

“Yeah, when I was out with Annie before Europe. Just a dress I thrifted. I left it at a cafe by accident, but they had it, thank goodness.”

“Oh, that’s lucky, baby! I’m so glad they had it.”

“Me too.”

My insides squirmed. I never lie to Graham.

“Well, that was a good thing for today!” he cheered. “Nice when things like that happen.”

He had no idea how nice!

I fell asleep much more peacefully that night, knowing I found my dress. The universe couldn’t steal my new notions. They were mine to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, from America to Europe, to ponder and to probably (necessarily) share with Graham sometime in the near future.

The author is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles. She’s on Instagram: @ashanoeliyer.

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