During a particularly acrimonious fight last night, I found that I was losing myself, and had no clue what was happening. Tempers were frayed, voices were raised and a huge towel had become wet from our collective tears and nose-goo. And I was fighting a losing battle, against myself. It seemed like I was consuming myself, and there was no way out.
I walked up to the kitchen and pulled out two New York shot glasses from the shelf. I reached for the top shelf, where we store the stuff, and pulled out the Talisker bottle. And I filled the shot glasses, up to the brim, and we downed it, one glass each. Soon, it seemed like all was going to be fine with the world.
At once we calmed down. We started thinking more rationally now. The fight continued, but the voices got lowered, the collective discharge into the towel ebbed. We weren’t consumed by ourselves any more. Instead, we were now calmly talking to each other, trying to find a way out of the problem we had at hand. Note that we didn’t kiss-and-make-up-and-bury-the-fight like we used to earlier. We didn’t sleep until we’d finished our business and reached an agreement. But life had become so much better.
I must admit that over the last year or more, I’ve consistently underestimated the wife (earlier the girlfriend) and her methods. Sometimes I’ve never understood why she does things in a certain way (and expects me to do things the same way), at other times I’ve been too arrogant in my own thoughts, to give her methods a fair hearing. This was yet another such example.
It was I who had made an irrational decision that Talisker was meant for slow sipping and savouring. It was I who had thought it was “too expensive to be shot down”. And it was I who had made the wife promise she won’t gulp it down before buying the current bottle of Talsker. I admit it, I was wrong. Wrong. The wife, it turns out, had always been right.