You Need to Quit… to Have a New Beginning

I thought life was a fairy tale until my glass slipper broke into hundreds of pieces and its existence disappeared out of nowhere. Life gives you roses and thorns. Life gives you floral fragrance and bleeding. That does not mean you are wrong now. You are not right either. You are just learning to value yourself in the transition phase. Life may feel like a standstill, but it will keep moving on. 

Reena was just 25 years old. A divorcee in the native land of India. Her husband was an NRI who didn’t deserve to be a part of her life. Moreover, who will stay with a husband who fucks around with each woman in his circle despite his wife? 

For the world, she is a woman who is immature. Who leaves an NRI with so much wealth and property? No one believes that her husband beat her for no reason. In today’s world, a single woman with no family of her own is still looked down upon. The woman is an object whose muscles can be clawed off into hundreds of pieces by the devils out there. Her body, instead of being a sacred temple, is not made for the world out there. Not even her husband or his friends, who enjoy her bare skin in front of one another. One knock leads to two, three, and seven, and sometimes eight. The screams were shut down with tape on her mouth. 

But the world only knows how she hung herself under the ceiling fan. The young Reena refuses to adjust to the world around her. Reena refused to oblige her husband's whims only to suck his elongated body part. Everyone saw a busy woman who was making money, but no one saw the belt marks or lashed out at her. 

“What can we say? Reena somewhere has gone wrong.”

This is what the world believes, and it is true. The world never waits for anyone. More than the divorce, what truly broke her was the lie she lived in for the past twenty-five years. The mutuals. As always. Her parents found fault with her as a career-driven woman. Her in-laws questioned her integrity rather than her husband's. The friends who passed on personal information with exaggeration from one place to another. 

The greatest fault lies in not being a divorcee, but it is always about tolerating pain even if you should have bid goodbye a long time ago. It is always about being connected to the pain and wondering if life will ever be the same without them. The fault lies in trusting people who can put themselves in your shoes, but the only reply was:

“You must have gone wrong this time. You should have tried to resolve the conflict.”

“You are immature when it comes to making decisions. Why leave when you could have adjusted?”

“You may have failed to make your husband happy; otherwise, how can his eyes wander to so many different places?”

These words sting more than the original wound. If life gives you lemons, make lemonade out of them or use them to hurt someone’s eyes. The truth will always hurt. You cannot hold on to the pain and then expect to move on. You have to free the heavy chains on your feet and fly… as far as possible…. Away from the birds inside the cage. Let them be them while you hold that coffee mug, type on your keyboard, start modeling, colour your hair in different shades, laugh with the strangers along the way, dance to the beat of drums during any big festivities, hold your own hands during Christmas carols, and drink a bottle of rum while seeing the fireworks above in the sky. 

At the end of the day, God has given you a body as sacred as idols in the temple, a brain that is purified into gold and will turn to diamonds with passing time, and healthy arms and limbs to move around and earn your own money in a dignified manner. Why waste your time on people who only come to you during your good times, but during your illness, they can’t be found anywhere?

Caution: This piece has references to domestic abuse, sexual coercion, and suicide. Please read with care and prioritize your well-being.