Don’t marry the girl you love. Leave HER. Just to prove that you can get someone better. Pick someone from the pretty photos your mom showed you. Choose her from you dad’s matched horoscopes. Date her from the single colleagues in your office. Get a fancy marriage. Take her to Mauritius. Remark on the natural beauty. Keep silent about hers. Don’t be alarmed when you feel a deep lingering regret. Be alarmed when you don’t feel anything. Ignore the eagerness of a new bride. Talk a lot when you can’t. But nothing of significance. Shut up if she does. Try to say trite romantic lines. Stop when you witness that they don’t stir her any more than they stirred you. Try to make love to her. Fail. Fuck her anyway.
Get back. Get yourself a career and not a job. Lay down ground rules. Send her anniversary gifts and spa treatments from office. See her late every night. Don’t see her every night. Take office people to lunch on your birthday. Build a moat and retreat into your bastion every time she asks what’s wrong. Brood. Become too jaded to brood. Ponder over how dreary your life has become. Get an ostentatious car to prove to yourself that it hasn’t. Hit the bottle when you realize that the car doesn’t help. That nothing helps. Keep hitting the bottle. Hit her when you are overdone with the bottle. Weep silently at what you have become.
Try to work even harder to earn more money. Get a kid. Get two to forget their mother. Invite people over to pageant your successful life. Let it crumble as soon as they leave. Say bitter words. Become too bitter to care about words. Let years go unnoticed. Notice that. Descend into ennui. Take trips to foreign lands when someone points that out. Smile for the photos. Return to your blackberry an instant later. Look up to catch a fleeting glimpse of HER face disappearing into the crowd. Try not to think about HER. Have a sleepless night when you can’t. Abstain from telling her that she will always be the second woman in your life. Abstain from telling her anything.
Gather up your youth’s savings. Grieve that your youth’s savings is only money. Buy a big house from it. Ask her to decorate it as she pleases. Fight over the color of the table when she does. Recognize that this is just stuff; horded over to cover up the emptiness between you two. Recognize the emptiness between you two. Recognize the emptiness inside you. Accept it. Burn the bridges and build the walls. Turn a blind eye to her tears. Shed a few when her eyes are closed.
Get a heart disease. Hire expensive doctors to prolong you pitiable life. Start taking walks on your doctor’s advice. Don’t feel like returning home at the end of them. Start earning more money for your kids. Realize that it was never money that they wanted. Realize that it’s too late. Realize that it always had been. Die fretting over the debacle you made of your inconsequential life. And let the last sane idea to pass through your head be that the better girl you picked never made your heart beat with even the iota of passion it did for HER.
Don’t worry about HER, she will die too one day, thinking of … What if?
P.S. - Inspired by a post in the Thought Catalog
