Height

It’s an exciting day. I am getting married. He is good-looking enough for our society.

I look up to him and feel a sense of crunching joy. We are drinking coke, talking

about random stuff and laughing at silly things.

I look at our selfies, zooming in on every single photo. We look so good together. I glance at

a photo of him with my younger sister. He looks a bit shorter than her which is odd. My

younger sister is the tallest among the three of us for sure, but is she taller than him? I guess

I hadn’t noticed it before.

We go to a nearby lake. We take photos. He buys me chips and chocolate. It’s a fun

time. I try to edit our pictures and share them on Facebook. But I notice he looks

significantly taller than me in our photos. I didn’t notice. I was stretching my neck that

much to look at him. It’s very weird.

It takes me a few photo checkings to notice that something is wrong with my partners

height. I become truly aware of it when we go to see his mother. She is sick. We are on a rickshaw. He puts his head on my shoulders and it feels like he is a little boy. He feels smaller and shorter than me at that moment.

I know I am 5’1 and he told me he is 5’6. I tell him about the changes I’ve noticed.

“What do you mean? I looked shorter than you?”

“Yeah, that day when your mother was sick I thought you were smaller than me.”

He stares at me in confusion. I tell him to measure his height with a measuring tape.

He measures it, and it’s 5’5.

“That’s weird. There must be some error.”

“Do you see? You are shorter now.”

I wonder why that is. I feel like I am the only one noticing that his height changes now and

then, And always  at odd times.

“That is definitely some kind of error. Measure it again.”

“No, you know what? This might sound really weird but I think your height changes based

on your mood. You looked taller on the day at the lake because you were happy. You were sad

when you saw your mother, so you looked shorter.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. It’s impossible. I was probably just hunched over because of

stress.”

“I know it doesn’t make any sense. But it really seems like that’s what’s happening.”

“Let’s measure it for a couple more days and see what happens, okay? Don’t jump to

conclusions.”

Nothing changes for the next couple of weeks. But it does when his mother falls into

coma. We don’t measure his height that day. But I became aware of how small he looks, and so I ask him to measure his height the next day. He does, and lo and behold, it’s 5’3!

“See now!”

“That can’t be true!”

Our collective paranoia and confusion are probably responsible for his stress because

the next day, he is down to my height. We scream in unison.

“Can it be a rare medical condition that you have? We should go to a doctor. Its

bizarre!”

We go to the doctor. I  stare at him the whole time, watching to see if his height changes or

not. I still can’t believe my eyes when his height is measured. I am sure my eyes are on him, and still, there he is! 5’5″.