Never Married, Yet I'm on This Wedding Tape

I bought a DVD for 1.50 dollars from a livestream that sold used items when I had actually been trying to buy the old DVD player sitting next to it.

The host was a man in his 40s. As he opened a cardboard box, he said, "Everything here is secondhand. I can't promise that any of it works. All sales are final. No returns or exchanges."

The DVD player was three dollars, and a pile of loose DVDs lay beside it. The streamer picked one of the DVDs up and gave it a wave. "I'll throw in a DVD so you'll have something to play."

I loved collecting old things, so I bought them without a second thought.

…

The package arrived the next day.

The player was covered in dust, and its casing was scratched in several places, but it still powered on.

The DVD had no cover and sat inside a yellowed plastic case. A single word was scrawled across the disc in black marker.

It read, "Wedding".

Other than that, there was no date and no names.

I planned to throw it away. But I was the kind of person whose curiosity only grew the more mysterious something was. I had to see what was inside.

At 9:00 pm that night, I put the DVD into the player. The TV flickered twice, then the picture slowly came on.

The footage was shaky, like an old wedding video from decades ago.

An emcee was holding a microphone, and his voice had the faint crackle of an old recording. "Now, let's welcome the beautiful bride today!"

The music started, and the camera turned toward the end of the aisle.

The moment the bride appeared, my hand froze on the remote.

She wore a white wedding dress and slowly walked toward the camera.

That face…

It was exactly like mine.

Even the tiny beauty mark near the corner of her eye matched mine.

I touched my face without thinking, and my mind went blank.

The woman on the screen smiled softly as her father escorted her down the aisle.

Meanwhile, I was too stunned to smile.

After all, I had never been married.

Forget marriage. I had only been in one relationship, and it ended after college.

Although I had been on plenty of blind dates over the years, none of them ever went anywhere. So the wedding in that video couldn't possibly be mine.

My first thought was that it could be a case of AI face swapping, but I quickly ruled it out.

The video quality was too old. It looked like it had been shot on a camcorder over ten years ago, not something edited with modern technology.

Besides, who would go to all that trouble to burn it on a DVD, then sell it for so little at a secondhand sale?

What would be the point?

I paused the video and zoomed in. The bride had a tiny mole below her earlobe. So did I.

When I was a child, Mom would always point to it and call it my lucky mark.

The video kept playing, and the emcee began introducing the couple. "Now, let's welcome the groom!"

The camera slowly panned over. But just as the groom's face was about to come into view, the picture suddenly shook violently. Then, the screen was filled with static.

A few seconds later, it went back to normal. By then, I noticed that the couple was already exchanging rings. It was as though someone had deliberately excised every shot that revealed the groom's face.

The wedding went on without a hitch.

Toward the end of the video, the cameraman started packing up, and the camera slowly tilted down.

Just then, the bride, who had already stepped off the stage, suddenly came to a stop.