Now nothing could remain as it once had been. It is inevitable. Its foundations were laid thirty-eight years ago. The house is dense and nostalgic as the bright morning sunlight casts its glare over the kitchen bench while the sweet scents of the Spring’s jasmine linger in the air.
The stack of homemade pancakes, or crêpes, as he would call them, steams in front of me. I stir my strong coffee and sit cross-legged at our American Black Walnut dining table, a gift on our fifth wedding anniversary.
The loose and delicate strap of my navy blue silk chemise – another anniversary relic, gifted after four years of ‘blissful matrimony’– falls from my shoulder as I take the mug of hot, black liquid to my lips. Seven twenty-eight AM. I inhale deeply, filling my lungs with the crisp mid-September air. My coffee slips down my throat, lukewarm as it churns in the pit of my stomach. A woman like me wouldn’t dare eat pancakes, I’m sorry, crêpes,
“Didn’t you want to wear a bikini this summer, darling?”, he would say.
For a moment, I ponder the true weight of this upkeep. In the scheme of it all, what is a pancake or two? Surely, society can grant a woman permission to indulge. How many ‘crêpes’ have I forgone in the pursuit of an ideal body, a conventional life?
I wonder if he remembers our wedding anniversary? Eight years to the day.
My gaze drifts to the casement window in the kitchen as I focus intently on the jasmine vine entwined in suffocation with the outside pergola. I squeeze my eyes closed as the Spring breeze sweeps me up and into another time, as the dining room morphs into a field of clover, eight years ago. My imagination allows me to feel the cool, green carpet of leaves between my toes.
Our wedding day was magical. I can feel his hand on my waist, firm yet gentle all at once as we danced under the soft kiss of the setting sun. The overhead fairy lights twinkled in the embers of his hypnotic, wild eyes. I twirl in his arms, draped in Italian ivory silk, feeling as light as a petal floating in the trust of the gentle wind.
My imagination losing its bearings as the wind propels me through the peaks and valleys of eight years of marriage. Like an onshore breeze anticipating its inevitable shift. Where did they go?
I succumb to reality and the pancakes, still stacked in the same perfect position, are now dull and cold. The smell of jasmine has been replaced with the sickly smell of amber and tobacco. It is his smell.
His dry kiss stings my cheek, as his cologne seeps into my pores, like a lingering memory, impossible to shake. The hairs prick on the back of my neck. This scent, which I had chosen for our wedding day, the matching edition of his and hers ‘Eternity’ by Calvin Klein, is now a bitter reminder of our solemn vow, “till death do us part.”
We’d tease each other about how one day, we’ll be bored of it and look for something new – not realising how newness would be sought from more than just a perfume.
His suit is stiff and his tie is tight, while his eyes no longer glisten with the same intensity, now resembling the melancholy of a domesticated cat, all too comfortable with the patterns of a life spoon-fed, not lived. I hardly recognise the man he was eight years ago. I hardly recognise myself either. I have noticed the shadow of midlife creeping nearer and nearer, a grey hair here, a wrinkle there. I recall a moment on a flight, in my mid-twenties when a woman cautioned her young child,
“Don't kick the lady’s chair!”
I had always been the girl – when did I become a lady? Now my reflection seems to echo the sign, ‘the girl was here’, yet no ownership of what remains has been embraced.
The pancakes I had prepared for him go unacknowledged as he brushes past me and out the door.
When we had first met, he had told me he most admired my tendency to question. How, why and what remain the three adverbs running circles in my mind. Questioning how it all went wrong, wondering why this had happened and asking myself what must be done. I scrape the limp pancakes into the rubbish bin and pour the remains of my cold coffee down the drain leaving the blue and white porcelain, a sixth anniversary gift, in the sink uncleaned.
“Darling,” he would say,
“It’s not like you to leave dirty dishes.”
The breeze pushes my hair from behind my ears across my face. The strong scent of jasmine has made my head spin. I pull the kitchen window closed. Within the hair that had blown across my eyes lay the gentle effect of an offshore wind gust. The petal had danced its way out of the breeze, falling softly and graciously to the ground below.
The glossy facade of my life has lost its lustre. In reality, me, the lady in all her glory, stands at her kitchen sink with her dirty dishes in her empty house pondering three possible solutions:
1. Get ready for the day and continue in submission.
2. Leave it all behind and catch the next flight to somewhere far, far away, cutting ties with everything and everyone, or
3. End it all now and slice my wrist open with that damn porcelain china.
I catch my gaze in the wall mirror between the kitchen and the dining room and stare. I notice the subtle clawing of crows feet appearing at the corners of my eyes. My hair, once long and golden, is now cropped and the colour of an unidentifiable marsupial. My lips curve downward, appear deflated.
Through my advancing age, my shadow paints a silhouette of a middle-aged woman entrenched in the past, a life lived in the corridors of nostalgia. As the sun moves to mid-morning, casting elongated shapes across the dining room, I bear witness to vignettes of a life fully lived.
I glimpse a younger version of myself twirling in the arms of my husband, a memory etched in time.
Now at the age of thirty-eight, standing in my kitchen, clad in my navy silk, I realise that the novel of my life is unfolding a new chapter. This chapter is marked by pages worn, stained, and bearing the smudges of life’s uncertainties. Today is an anniversary after all, but this year it’s my own milestone, one where irony dances in the limelight.
The air outside carries a tangible crispness, awakening my senses and rendering the familiar surroundings suddenly foreign. The once-constricting jasmine vine has transformed into a mere memory, a scent simply floating by — like a subtle perfume that adorns my very own essence of being. His words mean nothing now. Old skin has been shed; it is decided. I am moving beyond the suffocating tendrils of my past.
I stand ready to explore the uncharted territories alone, for myself, and all that awaits.