Like the rest of the world watched us from afar and possibly yelled at us to either kiss or break up. I wondered what we looked like to them. Two people with a past trying to make today work.When it doesn’t, what do we do?
Christian confused me.
Did he love me for the past seven years?
Or did he love me now?
Does he even love me at all?
The umbrella slipped from his fingers. Just when I thought his presence couldn’t tamper with my logic, he stood—cupping my freezing wet hands in his own. Then began to say, “Love is a choice. Loving you ismychoice.”
He thumbed over the skin. Those intense hazel orbs orchestrated a disastrous performance. “Since when doesithave to be this fucking feeling of falling. Why can’t it be knowing what’s behind the fucking door and turning the knob because I want to?”
I pulled away, turning my back to him. “That’s not how love is supposed to be.”
“That’s howmylove is!” His aggression whipped me around. If I thought his gaze held devastation, I was wrong. His body tensed and invalidated against him, working to break him, to create a disaster not him nor I could recover from.
Masking my own feelings, I swallowed hard. I was never good at talking, not with Umaima, not with Hasan. But withChristian, thoughts poured out and I didn’t calculate over singular letters. “Then what you’re feeling isn’t love, it’s familiarity, it’s reconciliation, it’smemories. We aren’t meant to last forever.”
Face to face.
Nose to nose.
Christian uttered with sheer desperation. “I amyourhusband.”
“For a year!”
He brought the paper up. I stared at it, but he stared at me. It was soaked through—unreadable. But the subtle word of marriage persisted through. “No,” rain soaked through the contract. “I’m your husband forever.”
The Christian who kept his control, who kept his calm broke in front of me the second he ripped apart our marriage contract. It didn’t take much pulling as the pieces liquified themselves and turned into grainy wet paper and stuck to his fingers like a disrespectful child wanting attention.
Our contract was that.
A child we birthed together, and we were abandoning it.
“I love you, Adelaide!”
Was he…
He was.
Christian wascrying.
“Nothing between us has been temporary. It never will be. I spent the past seven years moping in the lack of your presence, hoping that one day I’d be complete when I saw you again. I wasn’t. I’ve never been. But you see me, and you want me, despite bleeding on my broken pieces. I love you because you love me the way you love everything else. You love me like I’m normal and you love me like I’m human.You see me for my flaws instead of my beauty, you speak to me with kindness when how I behaved towards you was anything but. But I love you. I love you forallof you. I love you, I love you, I love you. It’s underwhelming, this word of love. Because it isn’t enough to explain to you how my heart is slipping inside of me, moving to one side then to another. It doesn’t stop thumping and all I can say—allI have is the ability to say I love you and it isn’t enough.”
I couldn’t do it.
All this composure.
All this waiting and overthinking.
I just couldn’t do it anymore.
What was the point of holding in this much vexation when all I wanted was for us to go home together?
Thunder echoed into the sky, still without the barrier of clouds.
Chests pranced, blissfully following the specific tune of people like me who couldn’t give in.
