Cultural Devices

I’m tempted to ask the clichéd question, ‘How much more can my heart take,’ but I think I’ve finally realized the answer. When it comes to enduring relentless pain, the heart, though feigned as most fragile, is in fact the ultimate strength. Its strength is powered by ability to torture its host time and time again, without ever letting an opportunity for masochism pass.

Should my body die, I’m sure my heart may still ache.

In my teens, I saw Dubai as the city of broken hearts and shattered dreams, because every person I knew seemed to have a heart-wrenching story of a love they lost. Mine, is much like many others.
I was a silly school-girl, oblivious to the power of love, the consequences of building a future based on story-tale endings and deepest longings. I didn’t mean for it to happen, and I don’t think he did either. But he loved me. And I loved him, and it blinded me. I was naïve enough to believe love really would conquer all.

He was from a well respected family, here. In fact, his father was a diplomat, someone whose name I still see from time to time in the media; only to conceive a week or more sleepless nights for me. And I’m just a nobody, really.

We spent nearly two years together; wrapped in each other. It was the most blissful time of my life; A real life fairy tale. I don’t believe there were ever two people more suited for one another than we were then.

We were torn apart by an almost hypocritical cultural devise.

His father and mother fell in love while studying. She was from the Emirates, he was from another Khaleeji country. He spent more than two years asking her father for her hand, to which my first love’s grandfather ruthlessly (and one time violently) denied. Despite this constant refusal, love conquered, eventually they wed. And together they created the man whom I would love so wholly and dearly, even years later I’d give up all I am and all I have to feel his arms wrapped around me for just a moment more; so long as death was promised to me the second he let go again.

Losing him made me believe my heart actually died, leaving only my skin & bones to mockingly feign the person I was, for eternity.

Losing him was like the first domino being tipped, creating a desperately painful chain of reactions destined to follow me for the rest of my life. Believing my heart had died; knowing I’d never feel such depth for another again, I married my now X-husband knowing I didn’t love him and never would. Believing I’d lost the only thing in the world I really cared about forced me into personal isolation, eventually causing my first and then second nervous breakdown.

In losing him I lost myself. And in reality, I didn’t really lose him. He was torn from me, by his parents who must have forgotten their own struggles in the past; parents who thought I wasn’t good enough for him; parents who didn’t want him to marry a foreigner.

We were too young to object. He was too young to defiantly do as he wished, and too good of a man to choose his own happiness over his parents. When he turned his back, he made the ultimate sacrifice for his parents; a move I’ll only ever be able to respect him for. But our bond was strong almost psychic at times. Our separation was only skin deep for years to come, until we finally succumbed to the bitter stench of reality.

It’s been almost a decade now. And I still think about him every single day. I’ve been diagnosed with emotional disorders. I’ve been on chemical medications. I’ve been married. I’ve given birth to a son. I’ve been divorced. I’ve been tainted by pain and I’ve tainted others with the residue of what I’ve felt. I’ve destroyed my life; and I believe it’s all because of that first domino tipping under cultural devices that may never change.

And even if they do change, it’s too late for our story to have a happy ending. Today, I’m not half the woman he fell in love with, and he’s not half the man I knew. By the time cultural devices change, the rest of the world will have changed as well.

Wash a single red sock enough; it turns pink and you no longer have a pair.