They say it was what one could call a textbook wedding. ‘Perfection’ played out in real time. “Till hell freezes over,” sort of union. It was five years into their relationships they decided it was time for the…”until death do us part;” milestone. The icing on the cake came in the form a honeymoon in Dubai! (The one place where everyone, except you, seems to be going to.)
Barely two months into ‘The Alice in Wonderland’ story, all hell breaks loose! From the nuptial bed to the courts! The real life drama still being played out in the courts and those with the knowledge say it was a vicious one. The ‘Abraham and Sarah’ reincarnations going for each other’s throats! And, not a single clue has yet emerged as to the reasons behind the all-out war.
There is this story I read somewhere and never tire of retelling. This guy’s amorous stars were dimming as his girlfriend started having second thoughts about their relationship. One fateful day he tries to mellow her with words even the Romeo fellow would have been envious about. But, she wasn’t having any of it. In fact, his pleadings stretched her nerves so much so that she delivered the knockout punch. “As far as I am concerned, you can go, take a dive!” A Tyson uppercut wouldn’t have been any more painful for the suffering guy!
Sell, innocent souls would have expected the poor guy whose ego was nuked beyond recognition would say something like, “Oh, so you are playing hard ball, don’t you! Wait till I show you what a real hardball means:” and then phone her best friend. Aha! There you are: no revenge, cold or still warm, could be more devastating than being to thrown under the bus by a best friend.
But the loyal lover, the guy does exactly what she says down to the letter; he takes a dive through her apartment window. The twist, as the literally inclined souls would have told you, comes at this point… hers was an eighth floor apartment! Poor guy! Romeo climbs up to Juliet’s window and is rewarded with a kiss, this guy goes down his love’s window and gets… the pavement! Life is so unfair!
Look, the stories of broken marriages are a dozen a dime, and most sound so bizarre you are left digging for conspiracy theories; “Maybe we should look more closely into the antibiotics they send us!” Bizarre, is not an overstatement. What can you say about the new bride who left the groom the morning after a highly entertaining wedding anniversary? That really happened! Just as the dawn breaks she phones her parents to come and collect her. Minutes later, they were honking for her. Those who narrate this story were more shocked about the parents’ behavior; not a single question, not the slightest blink of an eyelid, they just drive away, and, this is a killer, they were laughing!
Maybe, just maybe, the forces of darkness are pulling the strings! Now, there is no love lost between Lucifer and us; but the fellow can’t hate us that bad as to send every fresh marriage down the drain! In fact, the Lucifer guy is indebted to us. He should be giving us the thumbs up as we are polishing our skills in doing things that were thought to be exclusively in his domain… as if we were bound by ‘outsourcing’ deals!
As to what transpired in the dead of the night no one has a clue. What could have happened! The two have been, as a local pun would have put it, needle-and-thread for years. She is no nun, and he is no “Only on the wedding night and no sooner!” sort of Heaven chaser. So, with the very flimsy possibility of the nuptial bed revealing another secret, (like him turning into The Hulk!) no wonder confusion gets the best of us.
There is this story the final chapter of which I was never able to find out; setting… one of the big Addis hotels. Wedding… all the whiskey you can drink, short of tearing your bladder apart. Guests were having a really good time when an incident right out of a third rate Hollywood flop happened; the bride jumps to her feet and gives the groom the slap deserving a whole chapter in his autobiography.
The shock, those who experienced it say, throws the hall into that spooky, cemetery-like silence. Not a finger moving, not the slightest sign of a gasp. The bride sits down again as if nothing happened; but the ceremony never recovered from the mini-tsunami. The way eyewitnesses tried to describe the groom’s weirdly strange grin, only someone with Leonardo da Vinci genes could have captured it.
With the numbers of marriages and numbers of divorces inching ever closer what, in the world, are the marriage counselors and other professionals doing! No more “A thousand marriages and six hundred divorces were registered” sort of mostly stale news flashes and sound bites! Give us your expert analysis as to why such things are happening and how we can get the hell out of this mess! Because, that is what it is, MESS in large fonts!
How many of our Casanovas are told to “go take a dive,” I haven’t the slightest idea. But if there are those who decide to sing ‘Fly, Robin Fly;’ the warm-up stage before the dive would be making sure the apartment was on the ground floor!
The Ethiopian Herald December13, 2019
