The Last Tale of the Flower Bride

by Roshani Chokshi

Indigo did not speak. But our heartbeats shared the same rhythm. It said: Here is the dialect of the living and I am living alongside you. It said: I know this, too, and I can share it with you.

I have since learned that marriage is nothing more than a spell strengthened by daily ritual. The spell requires libations: mundane musings hoarded and pored over, the repetition of small dismays, the knowledge of how your spouse takes their coffee. Marriage asks for that crust of time you were selfishly saving for yourself. Marriage demands blood, for it says: Here is what is inside me, and I tithe it to you.

By the end of our third year of marriage, I understood that the secret to everlasting love was fear. Fear tethered love in place. Without the terror that came from imagining a life without your beloved, there was no urgency in loving them.

I was not only expected; I was wanted. The knowledge glowed inside me.

I treated the truth like a monster that could be summoned by speech alone.

For what is said is not nearly as interesting as what is held back. My research led me to

“If you are a figment of my imagination, some wild dream, I hope I never wake,”

I could not tell you where that magic came from, whether it was some unseen element insinuating itself into our atoms or if I served as mirror and moon to Indigo’s incandescence.

“Whatever you have let me know of you, I have loved,” I said. “And still love.”

And you cannot blame me for what I will do to set you free.

Only grief can make time change its tempo like that, expand seconds to centuries, with only our eyes marking the distance crossed.

I lingered in that memory and conjured what I knew.

Otherworld had beheld me in all my grime and sin, and still loved me.

I smiled, and she smiled back, and I was Helios in his chariot, pulling the sun behind me so today could become a tomorrow.

“Was our life so terrible that you had to destroy it?”

I was nothing but shadow. I existed in the afterthought of resplendence. I was a moving spot of cold. I was a home for ghosts.

When I looked at her, I saw all the people we had been to each other.