Rim and Ra

Chapter 1: Match Made in Heaven

The Beginning

The ocean view and the setting sun create a fantasy wedding. Watercolors couldn’t capture the sight if the perfect hand-painted them. The ocean waves swaying back and forth create the white noise of a gorgeous day of commitment.  The resort staff double-checked all the seating and accents to ensure perfection. The chairs and sand are beautiful, but it is a sticky situation. Everyone is certain about the match but uncertain what is certain about the match but uncertain about what to wear on their feet. Some of the older family members cough over the blowing sand. The scene is picturesque, yet the reality is a logistical Rubik’s cube. The couple, considerate of each other but not considerate of family member’s calendars, planned the wedding smack dab in the middle of a random week in the fall with no holiday surrounding it.

When family members of both bride and groom begin to sit down, some recognize one another from earlier meetings, while many meet each other for the first time. The mixture of colors is also a mixture of cultures. Left and right, combined with Christian and atheist, which then meets spiritual and agnostic. The crowd is binary for their support but non-binary when it comes to the ideological makeup of the crowd.

The bride, Rima Jamison, is ecstatic to marry her college sweetheart and sits with her bridesmaids in the resort hotel. They help her put the last touches of makeup on. They help her place all her Bohemian accents on. Her friends are happy for her. Yet they are exhausted; putting out energy for the inevitable marriage has been tiring for them.  The groom, Rashad Henry, is taking pictures with the groomsmen and leans into the moment, posing for the camera. The two love birds have followed the semi-traditional route of marriage. Semi, because they know each other already, but traditional as they tie the knot legally. Though Rima doesn’t really care about what the world thinks, she just wants to be with Rashad. Rashad wants the ceremony and its legality to show dedication to the woman he has had eyes for since sophomore year.

The two families are both excited and agitated. They are excited their loved ones have found true love yet agitated they had to travel to a destination to celebrate marriage they could have predicted a mile away. The two families have some who could afford to come and others who couldn’t, so the camera crew prepares a camera for an online viewership. The moment comes when the bride and groom are done with the preliminary activities. The spiritual guide of the occasion, an astrological new-age spiritual medium, leads the service, per Rim’s request.

Silvia, the spiritual leader, looks out to see the almost dichromatic seating. To her left is an almost all-black family side, and to her right, an almost all-white family sits. The wedding was a match Martin Luther King would have dreamed about. The groom comes first.

Rashad, a six-foot black male with brown eyes from the suburbs of Marietta, Georgia, walks down the aisle to a 90’s r &b melody. When he gets to the stage, he turns to look back at his bride in everything but legal paperwork. Rima, a tanned five-foot-six grey-eyed Caucasian woman from Concord, California, walks slowly down the aisle with her spiritual father, a yogi teacher from Palo Alto, while the melodies of a modern-day nearly erotic melody play. When she gets to the podium, the music stops. The brown eyes meet the grey eyes, and though the meeting has happened many times before, the moment makes Rim blush while almost making Ra tear up. Silvia says,

“They have decided to write their own vows.”

Some groan, some smile, and many just sit waiting for the money they have spent to come to the wedding to draw its last sting. Ra goes first,

“My love, we have been together for a while, but I have found my permanent place in you. You have always been home for me. You have always been my tribe. You have always been my one and only. I promise always to be the home you need and the love you deserve.”

Rim smiles and allows some tears to fall, then says hers,

“Rashad, you have been my soulmate since the day we had class together. We would have met many times over even if you hadn’t asked me for my number our fifth time seeing each other, but here we are, solidifying what we already bonded many times over. I love you and will always be your tribe.”

Silvia says,

“You may kiss-“

Rim almost leaps at Ra. The two kissed, and the whole audience clapped.

Years later

The two sit watching their suburban house burn—the peaceful exterior is consumed by the hellfire inside. The flames consume the idol they thought they could serve. The couple who have waged all-out war with one another sit on their lawn, waiting for the firefighters to arrive. The sober hearts of Rim and Ra look at the house they built, the home they desired, as it transforms from a safe place to an ash palace. Rim asks,

“How did we get here?”

Ra says,

“I don’t know. We tried to work things out, but I guess they worked us out.”

Rim grins at her legal husband’s humor. Ra says,

“We were supposed to be the couple that made it…we were supposed to be the couple that lasts…our kids are gone, our home is in flames, and we have no tribe.”

The two soak in Ra’s words. The two sitting the closest they have been in months. The charade for neighbors and family fell some time ago, but the house burns as a casualty in the war of hearts. The flames illuminate the night sky in a suburban neighborhood. Neighbors look on as the couple sit on the lawn looking at the family temple burn down. Rim releases emotions she has been hoarding for a long time; she begins to cry; Ra, with the last ounce of desire to protect her, squeezes her; the intimate war that has been going on for months has come to this. A burning house and a moment where both combatants don’t know what to do Ra holds her and says,

“We became the very thing we feared and lost the meaning of love in the middle of it all.”

Rim cuddles the only man she trusts in her life, while Ra holds the only woman he has known. The walls of the house they built fall in on themselves as the fire consumes some of the beams holding it up. Rim and Ra gaze at their dream-turned-nightmare engulfing itself. When the firefighters come, they begin their routine of taming the flames. After the fire is tamed, the couple is given the damage report. They decide to leave the scene and rent out a hotel room. The couple, weary in heart and spirit, sleeps in the same bed for the first time in a long time. Rim, for the first time in a long time, searches for refuge in Ra. He holds her, and the two fall asleep in the ashes of a temple dismantled from the inside out.