Marriage is complicated. We always feel like the grass is greener on the other side. But today, it’s a lot more complicated, with a million dreams, so many relationships and a new outlook to the whole concept. In such a world, does it really survive?
1. Married By Law > Wedded Souls
I had always been in love with the idea of a wedding. The pretty lights, the thoughtful gifts, the wishes and nothing to speak of the attention. But had I really been the one to get married? I guess not.
He knew that, 4 years had been long enough for him to figure it out. Convincing his family on the other hand wasn’t so easy. In the 90’s, parents were skeptical about love marriage, forget no marriage. But we did it, we overstepped boundaries, relationships, rules and we became that couple who didn’t get married. That wasn’t the end of it. If this was the perfect story then I wouldn’t be standing here, begging his parents to let me in.
I knocked in vain and yelled from a dark place inside me, ‘Please let me in!’
His parents hated the idea of me but not as much as they hated his dream of being an Army officer. But my man was strong, he didn’t want to waste his life doing something he didn’t want to do. The day he enrolled into the army, was the day he moved in with me. We’ve celebrated 12 anniversaries last November, I’ve seen him go from a officer to the army general.
But what I didn’t see still haunts me.
I didn’t see the letter the army sent to his family when he went missing, I didn’t see his comrade standing at my doorstep holding his hat in his hand offering his condolences, I didn’t see his body being sent to my house for last rites and I didn’t see the last letter he addressed to me.
Just because of one legal document, I didn’t get to say goodbye to the love of my life.
So today, standing on his parent’s doorstep all I can think about is what band he would’ve liked to call for our supposed wedding.
2. Just his wife
He’s sitting at his usual spot, changing channels and looking for a rerun of Game Of Thrones, though if you asked him, he wouldn’t be sure what he was looking for.
Knowing what he wants, isn’t his best quality, in fact I think it’s worse than his talent of picking fruits.
Watching him chilling on the sofa, I think of all the times I’ve felt like it’s foreign territory, like the couch is his own secret sanctuary and I’m not allowed on the forbidden Island. But the one thing that hasn’t changed since the day our families introduced us, is that look, the look he has on sometimes, the one which reads, ‘What if?’.
I look down at my half ragged T-Shirt and my washed out jeans and I’m reminded of everything I’m not.
I don’t have that carefree laughter which can make him smile, my collection of flowing skirts doesn’t want to make him jump my bones and sadly my curly black hair is nothing in comparison to her long brown mane, that used to spread across this sofa years ago.
I’ll never be the girl he fell in love with at 16, or the girl he lived with for 3 years of his life, or the girl who was the only love he knew, but I’ll also never be the girl who left him and moved to another country and married an NRI.
I’m just the girl his parents choose for him. So sometimes I feel like picking up the remote and changing the channel on our relationship, because this doesn’t feel like my love story.
3. Not anymore
I’ve always been my own person. In this world, you have to be. People have called me selfish, insensitive, cold but I just look out for myself, because that’s what I’ve been taught.
But when you fall in love with the nicest person in the world, it’s hard to see your behavior as right.
Her niceness, made it harder for me to justify my behaviour. I was the person who put meetings before people, she was the person who put everything before herself, especially me. She’s an amazing cook and she’d finally gotten an opportunity to work at a 5 star restaurant as the head chef, which she very well deserved. That was her dream, sadly for us it was also the time when I got admission in Australia.
Our parents decided it was the best time for us to get married, but I could see the hesitation she didn’t express. Instead of putting a stop to it all together and talking it out, I went ahead and let it happen.
That is my biggest regret in life.
Over the years, a course in Australia became a job, then a start up and now a full blown business. Even though I wanted her to live her dreams, I never gave her an opportunity to do so. Every day I saw her a little less happy, everyday I saw her less as the person she wanted to be and everyday I wanted to go back and change it for her.
Today, I happened upon a scrapbook she kept when were dating in college. I’d make fun of it all the time, so she never really showed it to me. I opened it and I couldn’t breathe. She’d sketched our whole life together and the last sketch made me burst into tears. It was meant to be a sketch of her in a chef’s hat but the charcoal was runny as if she’d been crying and she couldn’t complete it.
There it was, on paper, the dreams I’d never let her live, the dreams I’d crushed and left unfinished.
But not anymore.
Which one did you like the best?