Brook Fisk

I remember walking into the airport with tears streaming down my face, bawling after saying goodbye to him.

And a TSA agent came up to me and she said, are you okay?

And I said, yeah, I just said goodbye to my boyfriend.

But I'm sure she thought something was horribly wrong just from the amount that I was crying.

We said a lot of goodbyes that year.

We were not together.

But what we would end up doing is anytime either one of us had like a long weekend free or...

If it was one of our birthdays, we would take a little trip together.

We stayed at a bed and breakfast, up in the mountains, fireplace, woody, romantic getaway, candlelit dinners and fireside chit-chat every night, you know.

He called me a couple of days later and he said that he wanted to talk to me and he wanted to let me know that he had talked to his mom and that he had agreed to let his mom arrange him a marriage.

I was surprised because he had not been interested in an arranged marriage and hadn't expressed any interest in it.

He seemed resigned to it.

He seemed sad about it.

He talked about it like he was going to get a girl who wanted to marry a doctor.

I felt sad, but...

I think that part of me had been expecting it because we'd basically been trying to say goodbye for a year.

So even though part of me felt like he was still mine, he really wasn't mine anymore.

I told him that

if that was happening, then we really needed to stop talking to each other because it wasn't fair to another woman to think that she was getting a husband and have her husband over here in the United States talking to me and going on trips with me.

That's just not fair.