The Honeymoon I Took Alone
The tickets were non-refundable, and so, it turned out, was I.
Eleven days before my wedding, I called it off. Ten days after the date we were supposed to marry, I checked into our honeymoon suite alone.
I should explain the first sentence before you judge me for the second, though honestly, both were the sanest things I have ever done.
Nikhil was not cruel. This is important. Nobody cheated, nobody screamed, there is no villain in this story you can comfortably hate. He was steady and well liked and good to his mother, and for three years I mistook the absence of alarm bells for the presence of love. The wedding had five hundred guests, a booked banquet hall, and a caterer who had already been paid for the paneer. What it did not have, I discovered at eleven at night with a pen in my hand, was a bride who could write her vows.
I had put it off for weeks. That night I finally sat down at my desk to write them, and I wrote for an hour, and when I read it back, my whole body went cold.
I had not written vows... I had written a defense. Three pages explaining why this was a good decision, with evidence, like a lawyer who knows her client is guilty.
You do not write a closing argument for a man you love. You write it for a man you are trying to talk yourself into.
I called it off on a Tuesday morning in his parents' living room, and I will spare you that scene except to say that he cried, and I did not, and my not crying told everyone in the room everything, including me.
What nobody tells you about cancelling a wedding is the paperwork of joy. Joy, it turns out, is non-refundable. The hall gave back sixty percent. The caterer gave back nothing. And the honeymoon, eight nights in Sri Lanka, flights and a beach resort south of Galle, booked in a fit of optimism during a sale, gave back exactly zero rupees. The travel agent, a kind man named Farooq, said, "Madam, the tickets can be transferred to any name." Then he paused and said, "But one of them is already in your name."
I thought about that sentence for four days.
My mother said absolutely not. My best friend offered to come, then remembered her visa had expired, then offered again with such obvious dread that I released her. Everyone had the same look, the one you give a woman standing too close to a ledge. And underneath their worry I could hear the actual question, the one nobody would say out loud... what kind of woman goes on her own honeymoon?
So, ten days after my un-wedding, I found out.
The packing nearly finished me before the airport did. The suitcase had been half packed for weeks, lying open on the bed like a dissected optimist. His swim shorts were in it. His sunscreen, the expensive one for his sensitive skin. A shirt I had bought him to match a dress I had bought me. I unpacked him item by item and set each thing in a carton for his brother to collect, and that carton was the closest I came to changing my mind.
Then I put my dress back in the suitcase, alone this time, and zipped it shut, and sat on my bed next to it... and breathed.
The resort had been briefed by no one. I walked into a room with swan towels on the bed, two robes, two of everything, rose petals arranged in a heart, and a chilled bottle with a card that said "Mr and Mrs." The bellboy hovered, waiting for the mister. "He is not coming," I said, and my voice did not wobble, which surprised us both. The boy looked at the swans, then at me, in genuine crisis. "Shall I remove one towel, madam?"
"No," I said. "Leave them. They are both mine."
I want to be honest: the first two days were terrible. I cried behind sunglasses at a breakfast buffet built for two and ate both plates out of spite. I sat through the pre-booked couples massage next to an empty table while the second masseuse stood politely in the corner, until I asked her to just do my feet twice. At the sunset dinner for two on the beach, the waiter lit both candles anyway, and I watched the second one burn down opposite the empty chair and felt sorry for myself with a thoroughness I had never before achieved.
The turn came on the third night, and it did not come from me.
It came from the honeymooning couple in the next cabana, the ones I had been envying all week. I found the bride crying in the restaurant bathroom, mascara everywhere, still wearing her mehndi, three days married. Her new husband had spent the evening on his phone and the afternoon criticizing her swimsuit, and she was crying the way you cry when you are beginning to suspect something enormous and cannot afford to finish the thought. She did not know me, or my story. She grabbed my hand at the sinks like a drowning woman and said, "It gets better, right? Everyone says the first year is hard."
I stood in that bathroom looking at a woman standing at the top of the exact staircase I had just paid a caterer half a million rupees not to descend. I did not say anything wise. There is nothing wise to say to a stranger at the sinks. I just stayed with her until she stopped shaking, and told her she deserved to be spoken to kindly on her own honeymoon, and walked back out into the warm night, past my table with its two candles, and realized I felt something I had no right to feel...
Lucky. I felt lucky.
I did not lose a husband on that trip. I met the woman he had nearly talked me out of being, and she was worth every rupee of the cancellation fee.
The rest of the week belonged to her, that woman. She took the train up the coast with the doors open and salt wind in her hair. She ate crab curry with her hands, badly, alone at a plastic table, and the owner's mother came out to laugh at her technique and then teach her. She swam past the rope. She read an entire novel in one day for the first time since childhood. She learned that eating dinner alone in public stops burning after the third night and starts, quietly, to feel like ownership.
Nobody was disappointed in her all week.
It took me until the last morning to notice that the person who had been disappointed in me for three years was not, in fact... me.
Home again, the healing was slower than the brochure version. There were bad nights... There was the humiliation of returned gifts and the aunties' pity, which has a smell. Months later, a writing prompt I stumbled across asked for a poem about a room you almost lived in, and I wrote about the marriage like a house I had toured and not bought, and something in my chest came loose with an almost audible click. I filed that poem under new beginnings, which felt grandiose at the time and turned out to be accurate.
The suitcase lives on top of my wardrobe now. When I finally unpacked it, sand poured out of the zip pocket onto my bed, a whole spoonful of that beach, and I stood there with my hands full of it, laughing alone in my flat like a madwoman.
I never threw the sand away. It is still in the pocket. My passport lives in there with it.
Some proof you keep. Some suitcases you leave a little bit packed.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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