A Marriage

A short short story I wrote this afternoon:

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From the get-go, she had known it would be difficult.  Hadn’t they told her so?  Nothing worth having is easily won, they’d said.  Just get through the first two years and you’ll be fine.

It had been seven years, actually.  Seven long, hard years.  She’d been over the figures time and again.  The divorce rate was high.  Last month, she had attended a fiftieth wedding anniversary.  She thought the happy couple deserved a medal.  Why was it that long marriages were never honored?  They were so few and far between.  They deserved recognition, if nothing else.

Her husband had told her the night before that it was a bad seven years.  Was it, really?  She hated to lump all that time together and brand it with a single word: bad.  In particular, she recalled those long summer evenings when they’d take a drive, or watch a movie, or just lay in bed, content in the knowledge that they were alone.  Those moments were the happiest she knew.

She sighed.  Sometimes it was difficult to remember all those happy moments because they had been so simple.  It was far easier to recall the fights, the debt, the exhaustion of it all.  Seven whole years of knowing she should have been different.

Even so, she couldn’t bear to think it was wasted.  That was how life went, right?  You just sort of lived, and hopefully learned from your mistakes so the next seven years would be better.

They were due their big break.  That’s what they’d been told, at least.  Those who believed in karma said it was time for the downhill ride.  It was like reading palm lines, they said.  She needed to believe them, aching to find happiness.  Then again, happiness wasn’t merely circumstantial.

She didn’t want to give up.  Not now.  Nothing worth having is easily won, she repeated.

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Note: A Marriage is purely fiction.  See comments below.