Someone Like You | Sample

16

One Drizzling Day
-•-•-

While the rain outside continues to fall
Inside she watches
as he flicks the pages I of his
thick medical tome

His long, slender fingers
caress each thin page
and then he turns
to a new one

She watches
as his eyebrows
pull together in concentration
His dark hair shining
under the dimly lit chandelier
Every time
he tilts his head

The raindrops outside smile at each other
witnessing the scene
occurring before them

"Poor child, she does not even know,"
One whispers to another
as they fall.
The other agrees,
"It has begun. She is falling in love."

Growing up I remember I thought about marriage a lot. Many would say that I thought about it more than an average person would. I won't deny it, I suppose I did.

Marriage has always fascinated me. Maybe it's because of was how different the couples in my family around me in my childhood were. Whenever we visited family or had gatherings — I noticed. The couples. Some were happy, some were sad, some didn't care and some didn't exist anymore. I remember the first time I wondered how my marriage would be like was when I was in primary school.

At that time I wondered if my marriage would be like how it was in the movies. Would I stay at home and bake pie every day for a stern husband with a moustache and styled back hair that stuck to his head as if he had used glue instead of gel? Would I serve him tea and cookies every time he came back home from work? Would I press his clothes to perfection? Would I spend my days in the garden? Would my life revolve inside the perfectly white picket fence? Around my husband? Around us?

When I reached high school I had more knowledge about marriages — or more so about the people that were in these arrangements. It wasn't wise to classify marriages into categories, after all, how could all of them possibly be the same when the people were different? Still, I was sure I was going to marry someday. I just needed to find a suitable person.

During my teen, I wondered if my marriage would be like my mum and dad's. If I would find someone suitable, someone whose heart personally sung to mine, someone who balanced out my interests and filled up the voids I had like I filled up his? I wondered if when I found someone compatible would my husband and I really be okay with talking to each other while one sat in the toilet, right in front of the other, and pooped? Just like my parents? By the end of high school, I swore to myself that I would never let my husband hear me fart or know when I pooped.

By the time university rolled in, unlike Saara, my belief in the institute had almost shattered. After my last failed relationship in high school, I had sworn to myself that I wouldn't fall back into that trap. Still, how was it possible to just simply abandon a fantasy that I had weaved ever since I was a child? Maybe that was why I have always secretly still believed in a possibility.

Under the secrecy of my own thoughts, I wondered if marriages were like they were in the novels I read. Of course, I had been warned not to believe the idealistic romance and bed scenes these novels possessed. In fact, I knew not to believe them. But this tiny voice in the back of my head refused to stop — after all, where could such moments appear from if not from some small part of reality? People had to think of these ideas from somewhere, didn't they?
By university, my thoughts and opinions were a large mess — a blend of idealistic and realistic, immaturity and maturity, ignorance and curiosity. A lot more reluctant to believe, but a lot more dreamy.