Another Lifetime

It had been raining for a fortnight - the sky wept as if mourning the loss of an irreplaceable lost love; the sounds of its grieving cries echoed by thunder. The clouds that sailed overhead were massive, gray tufts of cottonball conjuring up random shapes, not very different from the sticky cotton-art pictures made by the chirpy 6 year olds who went to her for art lessons on Sundays. It wasn't Sunday. It was one of those days in the middle of monsoon when the joy of the first showers had long been spent and the empty, wet roads ten floors below her 4 bedroom apartment made her feel what she vehemently refused to give in to on better days - loneliness.

She was all of 39 years: married for 14 years and a mother of two. She had jumped into an arranged match with much hope of turning it into the warm, enduring kind of companionship that she had seen her parents share. However, the only adjective she could think of befitting her fourteen years of marriage was 'mellow'. They never had much to talk about beyond the shared mumbling of a few meaningless words across the dinner table drowned by the excited narration of the children about their newest achievement or mischief depending on which one did the talking. The worst was not when he was too immersed in work to talk. The worst were the silences when he did not have much work.

Mellow wasn't how she felt that evening. She felt the loss of something she had never had, something she had seen in the eyes of some of her friends who laughed more often. It was one of those days when loneliness crept up on her. So she did what she always did on one of those days – she closed her eyes and went back a thousand years to a different time –

She was young, perhaps pretty and a little breathless with laughter over some joke shared with the man holding her hand and looking at her with laughing, brown eyes. There were about a dozen other couples in the room dancing to the tune of a slow chart-topper and oblivious to the baby butterflies fluttering in her tummy just the way they were oblivious to anyone but each other. The music stopped for a couple of minutes as the orchestra prepared to burst into another feet-tapping number. He could see that she was a little tired and it was the perfect excuse for him to sweep her off the dance floor and have her all to himself for a few minutes until the next song. The empty couch near the balcony was soft enough to sink into and they slumped into it gratefully, still holding hands. She burst into a fit of tiny giggles and turned to him.

“I’m so happy”, she breathed between giggles. “You make me so happy.”

“Do I?” he asked. “Well that’s a start ‘cause I’m going to love you and keep you so happy for the rest of our lives that it’ll be enough to last you another lifetime.” 

Sometimes, when she thought hard enough, she almost believed that that was her. And then, like all those sometimes, she opened her eyes and whispered to herself, “I was another girl. It was another lifetime. And he loved me enough to last another lifetime. It has to last one more lifetime…this lifetime.”