The first time she imagines a husband, she is twenty three.

She is young and driven and has lofty goals for herself. He’s the goofy guy from her past – the first guy to ever give her a ring – who she hasn’t seen for six years. They bump into each other at that fancy bakery at the mall where he walks up to her while she’s halfway through her rotti and gushes about how beautiful she’s become since they last met. It takes him two tries to get her number because his hands are shaking and he can’t save it right the first time.

He asks her out on a date. She remembers what a fun play boy rich kid he was – that grin on his face when he slipped a ring on her finger, and the shock on hers when she told his girlfriend that she’s sorry they’re having a rough patch and his girlfriend asked her what she is talking about because they are not. She thinks about what a future with him would be like, and sees a miserable marriage where she has to endure a wealthy but exasperating life with a high functioning alcoholic who goes home reeking of whiskey every night while secretly wishing she’d married his twin brother instead.

(After all, Mac was the one who was good at Math.)

She turns him down, just like that.

-

The second time she imagines a husband, she is thirty and throws herself on the guy who tells her that she just needs a good man to show her that she can be happy with someone else.

He loved her – in his own toxic way – for a time. He gave her everything she needed, everything she wanted, everything she craved for. He gave her his dreams: a serious relationship within the quarter, marriage plans within the year, hundreds of thousands from stock trading, a house in the plateaus of the South, children with names like Ace Enexor and BSC Marie. And in exchange she only had to pay the cheap, cheap price of near total submission and access to her body whenever he wanted.

She imagines a life where she is well taken cared of, albeit one subservient to a self righteous husband, who, hey, wants and knows what is best for her after all. Where she soothes his quick temper with meek kisses to his cheek, where she hands him his favourite chocolates after dinner with soft reminders to be patient with people not as smart as he is, where she is the pretty main character that the douchebag villain is inexplicably kind to despite being an asshole to everyone else.

And then he broke her heart and all the rest of her.

-

The third time she imagines a husband, she is 31 and vastly different from her twenty three and thirty year old selves, but she knows she is in love.

He is quiet and kind and patient, with deep brown eyes that speak of stories old as time and ravishing lips that make her shiver over and over and over again. He is the moonlight tide rising lithely into the shore, calm and comforting but strong and self-contained. He is everything she ever wanted and everything else she didn’t even know she wanted.

For once, she imagines a happy life – 

- but she stops herself, because their pasts spill over to the present and the waves keep crashing on the castles she builds with not quite enough sand.

She hopes to God that one day love becomes enough.

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