In Another Life

A cozy kitchen dining table where I am comfortably sitting and watching a beautiful garden. I am not moving. I am not worried about anything. Just about food and shopping groceries and keeping the house comfortable for the people I love. I am loved and treated with respect and hugged and told I am safe.

I am doing good. I am doing well. I rest on the table and do my knitting and feed the cat and feel fearless about my health. All I have to do is go through all the rooms and make sure they are clean and well organised. When he comes home I have a smile on my face because I know he won't demand anything. He will just sit on the sofa and insist that I join him and give me a gift or something. I just sit and hold the gift with a smile, feeling pampered and cared for. I want to do whatever I can, everything in my capacity to make this man happy, to bring a smile to his face, to support him to do whatever it is he tries to do and be his power, his strength.

I am okay with anonymity. I am okay with being noticed only by him. I don't care. He is my everything. We sit and enjoy a warm drink. May be soup. And then we hold hands and stare into each other's eyes. He says he doesn't want to get up. He doesn't want to change anything. He just wants to sit there forever holding my hands like that. We sit like that. We keep sitting like that till the sun sets and the birds start chirping and hurrying back to their nests and we can hear crickets chirping and the street lights going ON. We know it's dark now and we have nowhere to go. We don't have to part. But we don't want to move. We just want to stay like this forever. Just stay. And smile. We are finally happy. Our heaven. 

What if?

There are versions of me. One version is trying to be a musician, but another is in a lab somewhere studying chromosomes and mutations. And yet another is a psychotherapist helping people find peace and healing in their lives.

But there are some versions that I wonder if I could still live. What if I spend an year becoming an art curator or an event manager stopping my practice completely and just being on the field helping artists I like find a platform to perform and display their work? What if I spend another year just reading books in a shed somewhere on a mountain and writing in the early morning hours, coming back after an year with a fully written novel?

What if there is also a version of me that marries and becomes a dutiful wife and spends her years without ambition but lots of love for her husband and children and a secret room kept aside just to steal moments of her love for music when no one is watching? What if I could take years off from my present life to experience different ones and then come back and work on my music again and make something different. What if?