I have two things on my mind; that one secret I’ve hidden from her and the other I am going to keep from my children in future.

Sometimes, the biggest secrets you can only tell a stranger. So let me tell you the first out of the two;

It’s a love story, but not one of those Kollywood flashbacks where they take you back to college when the couple first met or a wedding where they first danced together but a true story where the couple first met at the girl’s house on her brother’s birthday party. She was not like the girls you look at and ZING! It took me a while to realise that she actually had something impressive to look at. First, she smiled then she served coffee. “Less sugar, I heard”, she giggled as I took my cup of coffee and smiled at her. You are right, it wasn’t a zing at first sight but definitely a double-zing at the second, third and infinity because ever since then, I could never stop myself from falling for that girl. Our love story began in text messages, shared looks that turned into long stares sometimes and ended up in meeting each other on a daily basis; supermarkets, foodcourts, birthday parties and what not. We promised each other a forever and always like any couple and she worked hard to keep it real. I failed bitterly. I failed in many ways, from keeping her happy to keeping her with me and I take all the blame for it. Shizi was the biggest and most favorite secret in my life. Though after a year of missing each other, trying to patch up and efforts, she ended up marrying a guy her brother had chosen for her. ‘Wise choice she’d taken’, all my friends said but it was not comforting me. It haunted me for a year, two, three and on the fourth, I agreed to marry someone else too. Some secrets become a part of you. It’s like you conceal a part of yourself, thus you look incomplete outside. That is how I felt about marrying another girl after Shizi. I talked to the girl, but the conversations I sensed were half of what I had had with my first love. I looked at her, but not with both my eyes.

That’s my first deep secret; Shizi. She’s the kind of beautiful secret, all about her - whatever we had in between... all of it shall remain a deep, painful secret buried inside of me.

“The greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places...” - Roald Dahl