Pause, Play, Live

I pause play on life like teenage girls pause Taylor Swift songs—frequently but always with great reluctance—with heartbreak.

 Some might say that is a blessing, one more moment to appreciate what I have—it’s what people always beg for, isn’t it? More time? One more moment? Just one more?

They would be appallingly wrong.

My ability is not a gift. I can only stop time in the moments when what I love is being taken from me. It’s one more moment to suffer the grief, one more to grapple with the inevitability. There is no comfort to be gleaned. Only prolonged despair.

If I could, I would rewind to before “The Moment I Knew” every single time.

PAUSE:

I learn of my ability the day my father dies. I am picked up from school by the aunt I’d been staying with while Abu was in the hospital. He was sick, had been since I was five years old. I never questioned that he would get better. Oh, to be ten again, and not aware of how quickly your life can change.

I chatter away the whole drive home. To this day, I don’t know if I was deluding myself, or if I was really oblivious. 

When I spot my grandfather, a tall, stoic man, sitting on the verandah of my home—not my aunt’s, mine— red-eyed and drawn. I knew. Time stood still.

That’s an overused saying, isn’t it? Well, to that I say, even a broken clock is right twice a day.

I scream, a banshee born from the pages of my favourite Goosebumps, and time flickered to a halt. When Dada didn’t move, when Auntie didn’t hush me, I looked at the beaten, well-worn watch that hadn’t been there on my childish wrist a moment prior. I recognized it. Abu’s.

His watch had ended.

Mine had scarcely begun.

Ten years old. I had my father’s wristwatch, and Abu was gone.

Time moves strangely after that, for what is already a fickle, meandering thing. I have no real memories of the days that followed, beyond snapshots and sense memories. The phone calls for Abu from people who had not yet been informed—telling them, to protect my mother from having to. A child’s idle hope, sitting at the front stoop at five p.m, waiting for my father to walk through the door and give me a hug as he always did. My solid mother on shaky ground. Growing up all too fast, in minutes and moments and seconds that I couldn’t seem to up the speed on.

PLAY:

I think I thought it was a fluke, even childish make-believe to understand the worst moment of my previously charmed life. Instead, it happens again. I make it happen. A quintessentially teenage milestone: a broken friendship that I had thought would be forever. My best friend choosing to believe the rumour mill over me. The details aren’t relevant, but the emotion that tears through me are.

Devastation.

“Please,” I beg.

She shakes her head. “Don’t play the victim. Everyone knows what you did.”

I only scream on the inside when I pause this time. It’s instinctive, but it’s also almost worse than the reeling of the moment prior—an eight year friendship unraveling in eight minutes. The scene freezes on furious brown eyes, a downturn to my friend’s usually smiling mouth. There is stubborn determination on my best friend’s face. I take it all in.

I know what it looks like when she’s made up her mind.

My tears drip onto skin-warmed leather, my father’s watch my constant companion in the worst of times. They linger on both faces.

The friendship is lost long before my tears dry.

Time perseveres. Against all odds, so do I.

LIVE:

The day I get married, I am more aware of the transitory quality of human life than any twenty-four year old should be. Instead of feeling indestructibly alive, I feel fragile. Temporary. Fleeting.

I adjust the bridal-red dupatta, heavy with embroidery, stone work and the hopes and dreams of a happily ever after.

I look at myself in the reflection—made up and unfamiliarly adult—and remember the little girl playing pretend, breaking herself open for one more minute, fruitlessly hoping her new reality would revert to the happiness before the shattering.

It never did, and somehow I never let go of the hope that it would.

It had stopped me from experiencing so much, knowing the inevitable bad end would linger like the smell of cigarettes, seeping into the very fabric of the once happy memories. I let the fear hold me back.

I realize I don’t want my marriage to go the same way, bated breath, tenterhooks, and miserable moments that linger longer than they should. Maybe they’re instants—there and gone—for a reason.

I unbuckle my wristwatch, the last memento of my father still left to me after fourteen years, when even the memories of him have begun to fade away. It vanishes with as little fanfare as it had appeared.

I feel bereft. I feel relief.

In the now empty space on my wrist, I pull on the choorian—gold bangles that are a customary wedding present—gifted by my mother and mother in law.

I imagine smiling at my husband—waiting at the end of the aisle—as I choose to press play. To dwell less on control and staying the inevitable. It is a freedom in and of itself.

I choose life—aches, heartbreaks and all.

I never pause on the bad moments again, and only think back—naturally, humanly— on precious things: my husbands toothy smile, the crow’s feet around his eyes, the warmth of his hand in mine, him by my side through thick and thin. Through time. I think of my friends and family, our achievements and the home we build around us over the course of a life together. We let the bad pass just as sure as the good does. We live, we die, as everyone does—in the space of a moment, and no more. No less.