The Bride

Standing on the altar of marriage, he saw his bride-to-be, so pretty and so beautiful and so much in love. He had looked at her for the fourth time in the last one minute. She was looking so breathtaking it was hard to look somewhere else. After a moment, she raised her eyes and looked back. He smiled back.

Minutes before he had seen her entering the hall accosted by her bridesmaids. Everybody had turned around to witness her stunning beauty, goddess-like features, and a walk that resembled a model walking down the ramp. One could hear a collective gasp of breath passing as she walked by one row of admirers after another.

She was wearing a pink colored lehenga with a green colored choli. An orange dupatta adorned her head. The gold colored embroidery on her lehenga shimmered in the night lights. The tiny crystals embellishing her dress rendered a hypnotic trance to her walk, almost dream-like.

She had walked up to him so elegantly and so effortlessly that it appeared she had practiced this walk for very long, maybe all her life. She came and stood in front of him. He felt skipping a heartbeat. She was extremely beautiful, one in a million, the girl many would die for. She took his both hands in hers and whispered something about how happy she is, that it’s a dream come true.

It was then that his eyes moved over to the people sitting in the hall.

As he looked beyond his bride-to-be, another face scrolled up his vision, the face he fell in love for in college, the face for which his heart still beat, the face which was floating alone in the crowd. She was looking back at him. A thousand emotions ran across her face at that instant. He almost cried her name.

She had an inquiring look on her face, a look that begged for answers. Sitting there it appeared she was asking answers to questions that he left unanswered, the reasons that he left unexplained. In the silence of her face were the screeching yells that pleaded an explanation about why did he let this happen, why did he let her go . . . why did he break her heart?

Her eyes reflected his broken promises and her unfulfilled dreams. A drop of tear trickled down on her face.

His eyes moisten from the tears in her eyes. He couldn’t muster up the courage to look at her any longer. He hadn’t noticed that they were now accompanied by the priest, who was murmuring sacred vows.

‘Do you take her to be your wife?’, the priest asked. ‘I do’, his voice said, ‘I wish I did.’, his heart cried.

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