Despite what his parents had projected on him, Omkar had no plans to throw his life away. He had three classes to attend before figuring out their next steps, and so, once he made sure that Aria was willing to wait on campus for him to be done for the day, he drove them both to the crowded parking lot of his college. He bought Aria a container of breakfast hash and a pudding and led her to an open space on the green lawn just outside the cafeteria. He opened the lids for her. Watching her eat made him feel settled. Omkar was afraid that the way his parents had reacted to her would make her change her mind about him. He could tell that the impact of being so harshly unacknowledged and renounced had made her withdraw inside herself. It was true; Aria had been wounded by it. But it had also been the story of her life. It was a sensation she had unintentionally become an expert at holding, being passed from temporary home to temporary home, none of which was a family.
Omkar coaxed her to lean against him. He pulled at the silk of her bangs with his fingers. “I feel really guilty. I should have explained about my culture to you before. Indian parents have a hard time accepting that times have changed. No matter how old you are, they treat you like a child. In my culture, most marriages are arranged by our parents and it’s kind of a big deal to them to make sure that the girl comes from a certain caste and a certain family and a certain culture and a lot of other things.”
“Well, what do you want to do?” Aria asked, not wanting to come between Omkar and the life to which he belonged.
“I don’t know. For a long time, I thought I might actually prefer for my parents to choose who I should marry. But that just isn’t the path my life went on. Part of me thinks it might be destiny that my parents moved here, because I was meant to meet you. But it doesn’t really matter, because I am in love with you, so it doesn’t matter who my parents want me to marry or if it’s a good idea or not.”
“But I don’t have a family. I know how bad it is to be without a family and you don’t. I don’t want to be the thing that ruins your relationship with your family. That would fuck up our relationship so much worse than you realize,” Aria argued.
“Are you the one saying you won’t accept my family?” Omkar said. It was more of a statement than a question. “No … they are the ones that won’t accept you or me for that matter. You aren’t the one not accepting my family; they are the ones not accepting you, so they are the ones separating me from them, not you. You need to trust me. I won’t let anything ruin us.”
Aria rested on the belvedere of his reassurance until it was time for him to go to class. After he kissed her forehead and she hurried across the courtyard between the buildings, Aria realized exactly where she was. She watched the students file past her and felt intensely out of place.
Unlike her, these students had been sheltered. For them, the future was a risk they were excited for. College was rather like a low cliff over dark waters. A diving board off which they would jump into the real world, hoping they could swim. And of course they would. Their success was obvious to everyone but them; much like a baby taking its first steps with trepidation.
Aria had never been given the luxury of wondering whether or not she could swim. She had never been given the choice to jump or not to. There was something in the weakness of their buffered lives that she both despised and envied. For the first time in months, she thought about the school she had dropped out of. Dropping out had proven to be a conflicting move. On the one hand, it made her both freer and therefore more empowered than her peers. It was like she had broken out of a prison that the rest of them had chosen to stay trapped in. On the other hand, she could clearly see now how everyone else was being funneled down the road of success. They were both supported and led. She was now forced to fend for herself in a world that she had not been ready for. Nothing about her future was a guarantee, least of all success. Aria’s graph was measured by an axis of pain.
Sitting on the green, Aria felt bad about herself. Though the other students would see her as indistinguishable from themselves and probably mistake her for one of them, Aria could not forget the differences between herself and them. She felt classless. It was strange to her; given that she found school so embarrassingly cumbersome, dumb even, that seeing herself as a dropout would cause her to feel so bad about herself. She chased the feeling away by finding a bathroom and washing her face with cold water.
The threat of failure chased the students like a specter toward their chosen majors. It made them run from classroom to classroom and study from dawn to dusk. Only the occasional student looked to have ended up there by accident, or to have been placed there because of the prestige belonging to their parents, who viewed their attendance there to be critical. Academic prestige lingered over the buildings, whose prime had come and gone. The words belonging to the books read and exams taken there for over a hundred years were written heavy on its chaptered stone.
Aria leaned against that stone, waiting to see
