Decadence by Monique Miller

pee, but I wanted to look at myself one
last time in the mirror before I became my own bonafide monster,
the type of girl who was about to tell her boyfriend, her fiancé ,
that had done nothing wrong, that she didn’t want to be with him
anymore after he had just asked her to be with him
forever.
    When I was younger I couldn’t believe the
girls who did that, who would hurt someone like that. They weren’t
women; they were girls, selfish little girls. I hated them. Now I
was one of them. And I felt bad for not truly being able to say
that I hated myself.
    I smoothed down my windblown hair, surprised
that I didn’t look nearly as bad as I felt. I’d expected to see
ashen skin, dry lips, red puffy eyes, but instead I looked fresh.
Tousled at the most; it was the kind of look Ryan always said he
liked. That made me feel worse. He always said it made me look
beautiful when I was just off my bike, like a California girl on
the wrong side of the country.
    That was just one of the things I had always
liked about Ryan, he’d never made a big deal about my looks. He
told me I was beautiful, gorgeous, and every other word you could
imagine a guy telling the girl he loved to convince her that her
looks were superior rather than average, reassuring her that she
was better than most, his favorite, and all the while he had never
made me feel as if I were different like the way I had always felt
growing up. The way he looked at me made me feel like the only girl
in the universe, the only girl in the universe that he wanted.
    The only time he had really mentioned my
looks in any detail and made me at least realize that he wasn’t
completely blind was when he brought up how I thought our kids
would like if we had any. With my mixture of Korean and African
American genetics and his Irish-Italian ancestry he wondered if the
Asian gene would be dominant no matter what. At the mere mention of
a future together, the possibility of children tying me to another
person as long as I lived, I felt my body go rigid in his arms. I
didn’t say anything. The idea of what he’d just said made me go
numb, speechless.
    Ryan, on the other hand, laughed, and
squeezed me tighter. “Don’t freak out, it’s just a hypothetical
question. Relax.”
    But I could tell it hadn’t been just a
hypothetical scenario he’d been throwing at me. He’d been feeling
me out, wanting some kind of answer one way or the other. I knew he
wanted an answer I couldn’t give, and he proved it by asking me to
marry him two years after trying to laugh it off.
    I had to be stupid. Most girls would do
anything to be with a guy like Ryan. At first, I told myself there
were a jitter for everything and that was all there was to it.
Engagement jitters. A little cold feet. Ryan was a great guy,
husband material, honest, hard working, loyal to a fault. He
forgave people when he shouldn’t have and bailed them out of
trouble when they didn’t deserve it. He had a promising career in
front of him and a clean past behind him--a rarity. He was any
woman’s dream man.
    But not mine.
    What was wrong
with me?
    The truth was, there was no excuse that I
could use--not my age, or the fact that my sister I were orphaned
when I was still in the single digits--all I could admit, in the
end, was the truth itself. The truth was, it didn’t feel right. I
didn’t want to pledge my forever to Ryan when I had doubts from the
beginning. I didn’t want to be his wife. I didn’t want to be
anybody’s wife. At least not now. Then again, I wasn’t sure if I
ever would.
    Commitment. Long term. Marriage. The diamond
on my left hand felt like a weight bearing down on that one little
finger, like a rock that could take me to the bottom of the ocean.
Heavy and damning.
    I looked at my reflection in the mirror
again, at the girl who’d said yes when she should have politely
closed the ring box, pushed it back towards him and told him I
would think about it. But there was no real etiquette when