Happily Ever After Series
Reminiscing
One of my ex-boyfriends bought me a cinderella doll when I was twenty. After we ended our relationship, I tucked it away in a happy home filled with love, laughter, and heartbreak and moved to another country to start my life again.
A few months ago, while I was packing up all my belongings to leave the country I grew up in, my Cinderella doll found me amidst old notebooks, musty trinkets that reeked nostalgia, and winter clothes tucked away for a season I hardly ever see anymore.
Notions of Love
I picked up the doll in my hand and smiled as I ran my fingers over the glittery sky blue net of her dress. I can’t remember what my first notion of romantic love was, but I am quite certain it was Cinderella.
It was woven into bedtime tales, the kind of unexpected love between a prince and a common woman, it was magic, just like that beautiful dress she wore.
At the age of four, I watched my first ever movie on the big screen, Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge. I don’t think I understood much of Hindi back then, but I loved the movie. Like most Indian girls in the 90s, Shah Rukh Khan was the first man I thought was Prince Charming, the Desi version, of course.
I think for a long, long while I was sure that SRK would find me someday and we would run through marigold fields together, so happy in love. But then, I grew up a little and began to understand the several problems with this dream.
At the age of nine, on a sick day home from school, curled up in my blanket reeking of ointment, I found love again in Jude Law. This time I was aware of the fact that I would not spend the rest of my life with an Englishman, 20 odd years elder than me. But still, I loved how in Music From Another Room he wound up with his childhood love.
So THAT must be love! I thought to myself, I find someone now and years and years later we will fall in the kind of love grown ups do, and live happily ever after.
I didn’t exactly find anyone like that for a long while.
When Dreams Came True
But at sixteen, I found a boy I reckoned would rather do for me. He was tall, tanned, the captain of the Sports Department in school, and he seemed to like me back well enough. Thus began my happily ever after series, unfolding before me like the tapestry that would someday have my whole tale woven into it.
Falling in love was exquisite, it was magic. Staying in love was poetic, poignant. But actually making a relationship work was something devoid of anything romantic, it was two people scraped down to their bare human, trying to accept each other, sometimes even before they have completely accepted themselves.
Human Heartbreak
In my happily ever after series, with each season anew there was love found, lurking at the next corner bend. But it wasn’t too long before the clock struck 12 and the sweet resounding of Shakespearean sonnets died a violent death, trapped between two lovers whose love turned tumultuous.
I, who prided myself on being ever so accepting of people’s human, began to pave way for the voices in my head that screamed jealousy, insecurity and ‘you deserve better’.
I chided myself for not being more understanding, he hated himself for not being able to make me happier. I tried to silence my fears and then tried accepting my human, he felt lost and disempowered against my seething contempt and raging anger.
I stop.
Chaos
When did loving someone get so complicated?
Wasn’t love about something tender and compassionate in you blossoming and making everything else seem transcendent? How then pray tell, did it become this dark, ugly brawl between your base instincts to be just as you are and the part of yourself wanting to do better by someone you love?
I found all the different types of love I grew up believing in but gave up on them one after the other because an adult me was convinced that either I deserved better, or my partner did. After a certain point, I began wondering if there was just something wrong with me.
I understood that enchanted sunsets, marigold fields, and childhood loves were only a mirage of what the real deal looked like. The real deal was not pretty.
It’s something to give up on love when you are not able to find it. But when you do find it, and wear it out over and over again, you begin to wonder if it isn’t but an elaborate scheme you sketch out for your own misery.
Rediscovering
I placed the doll into a box and picked up a little notebook. Flipping through the pages, I found something that made me laugh.
About six months ago, I had attended a traveling musical play of Cinderella with two of my friends. The auditorium was filled with little children and their parents, and the three of us.
After the show, we made it a point to find a way into the green room where we met Cinderella and her step sisters. I held out my notebook as I told her “You’ve gotta sign this for me. I can’t believe I finally met you!”
She laughed, signed it, and wrapped me in a warm hug.
Running my fingers over her name, I thought to myself, I wasn’t certain about love, but there was definitely some magic still left in this worn out heart.
