The blackened end smoked out its last ebbs of wood. The candle flickered in the background, but the bitterness between us soured the air. She gave me the match to light up the ancestral lantern, but all I wanted to do was to stab its dead flame into her arms. Lighting the ceremonial ancestral lanterns is a custom of our culture, but this honor felt degrading. What was marriage worth if it was not settled over physical confrontations?

When we first met, she was looking for her friend at a cafe. She made the mistake of running late to their meeting, and her friend was already halfway gone without telling her. She was not the type of friend you want around, but she had no choice but to stuck with her only friend left. I caught her attention by shifting close to her and asking about how stressed she looked. Her entire body jolted when I spoke, and it was later on they I learned that relationships have never been easy on her physically either. Perhaps it was this guardedness that wrapped her view on relationships.

Her black hair fell down to her waist, and her eyes were the coldest blue there was. It should have been a warning sign, but no warmth could have convinced me that I was making a wrong decision. She wanted to leave me behind the moment we talked, and it took a good half hour before she relented and gave me her number. She wasn’t pleased with me, so I expected a random person on the other side, but to much misfortune, she answered. d

The flame lit up only when she started to imagine what a good life it would be to marry a surgeon. No more career work—just be a stay at home mom. Her interest in me exponentially increased when she became aware. She wanted a family at the most minimal cost her lavish lifestyle. I thought meeting her expectations would be in the true warmth forward underneath it all.

We engaged, and when the day came, I always threw up due to anxiety. No one interrupted our ceremony, but some days, I wished some random homeless guy just ruined it all. It would have given me enough time to reconsider. Loneliness may have been more preferable than this.

In our culture, it is looked down upon to divorce, and even as the flames died so quickly and her smile became more cruel as we discovered there was no hope for kids, we stuck along with each other. I was the stale bubblegum stuck on then bottom of the school desks. I took the burnt match and smelled the dead essence. I twisted it with my hands, threw in the grass, and wished the lantern of the dead carried me away.