One Day

One day, this is going to be a grainy picture.

Yes, we paid the photographer over half a million Naira for his ‘Shine Blue Shine’ package. You had asked him what sort of a tag that was; shine blue shine, and I had looked at him sympathetically and pinched you. As he stuttered to reply, you giggled and said to him, ‘Just kidding sir. What am I thinking trying to vex my wedding photographer? You can make or mar’. We had all laughed.

Now, we are looking through his finished work, and boy are we shining in resolutions! You point at the picture which is easily our favorite; me laughing with my cake-smeared hand clutching my tummy,  and you with cake all over your suit and face laughing as though you were pooping really hard: our happiness abound in pixels. But you see, one day, this is going to be a grainy picture.

One day, our wedding attires won’t fit into these bodies anymore.

Yes, we had bought each other’s wedding outfits. Me, purchasing your suit over the Internet, and in a matter of seconds. And you, dragging me along to every bridal dress store you knew, in between work-breaks and weekends until we found the dress that both made us yell ‘Yes!‘ and not simultaneously bulge out our eyes at the price tag.

On our way out, I had worried about getting fat before the day, and you had said, ‘Hmm… That’s a possibility. But here’s an impossibility: Me entering a bridal store again for a purpose other than helping our daughter pick out her wedding dress in the future.’ I had scowled at you and said I prayed you’d develop pot belly before our wedding day.

Well, we fit perfectly into our outfits; you looking so new and like an ad from a magazine, and me looking as gorgeous as you know I looked.

But as the days fold into themselves, so may our skins fold, and as time stretches we may stretch and take up more space so that one day, our wedding attires won’t fit into these bodies anymore.

One day, we will find that not all our jokes are funny or even tolerable.

Yes, we didn’t plan the cake-throwing fiesta we ended up having. Me, in my constant mischief thought it’d be fun to grab a layer of our 5-tier cake and hurl it at you. And you in your spirit of camaraderie grabbed the second layer and smeared it all over my body. Our parents did not think it was funny especially since they were convinced that we had just altered something in the spirit realm. As in, two layers of our wedding cake gone by sheer playfulness. As in, what if each layer represented something?

You had told my mom that we’d bake another cake and send a picture to her; ten-tiers, you promised. And we had proceeded to pick pieces of cake from each other’s bodies and feasted.

But one day, I may play a prank or crack a joke, and you wouldn’t find it funny. I may, also, almost burst at the seams in anger for an act you genuinely thought was funny.

But I hope that one day, when we aren’t #2527 anymore – one day, when we are #5254 or #7274 – that day, we would be old and gray and cooler than hashtags.

We would have a bunch of children and flock of grandchildren and they’ll always want to touch my hair and caress your scalp (because fam, you’ll inevitably be bald).

I hope on that day, we would have smiles wider than the ones in our wedding pictures; that our joy would be larger than what we had on our wedding day.

I hope that on that day, when we would talk about ‘the days’; the days when our grainy wedding pictures were the best we could get from digital technology, the days when we could fit prefectly into tiny-ass wedding attires, the days when you still thought you’d be a cool enough parent to be invited to your daughter’s wedding shopping, the days when throwing cake was the funniest thing we’d ever done to each other – that when we talk about those days, we would acknowledge that as beautiful as they were, they were only an introduction to a lifetime of friendship, forgiveness, vulnerablility, strength, growth, refining, partnership, joy, understanding, support, and love.