No Moment of Truth

The video shows our wedding vows back in 2005. She started out strong, no problem making promises to the church and the priest, but started fading right away, and after the priest said, “This is the moment of truth,” she didn’t speak again till the vows were past. So the part of her vows she didn’t say were the vows she was supposed to be making to me, the “for richer and poorer” “in sickness and in health,” etc.

Two or three years later we were arguing about something and she said that she had purposely not said her vows at the wedding because she had tried to back out of the marriage after mailing out the invitations, but her oldest sister Inday Fe browbeat her into going through with it. She told me the names of four people who she had confided in regarding this deception or whatever it was. Besides Inday Fe, the others were a woman named Cielita (?Shellita) who she used to work with, her niece Tata, and another niece Girlie.

I sometimes think this whole thing was actually engineered by Girlie, the oldest of Tampoka’s nieces and nephews and the daughter of Tampoka’s oldest sibling. Girlie herself is married to an American and applied considerable pressure to Tampoka to not give up on finding one to marry. How much influence she has I don’t know but I think it was a lot. Then when I was married and living here, Girlie kept telling her papa to borrow money from me when he asked her for money, and that was the beginning of the end for me here because up to that point, her papa had been my chief confidante, someone who would always talk to me. But that’s another story and I’ll tell it another day.