Loving Him Was Easier Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again
I swear his fingers were fire. Eyes too. When we touched, his skin would melt mine. It hurt. But only for a second.
The scar on his right index knuckle would dance when we wrestled in his bed while his feet hung over the mattress. His hair, silvery grey, except for the few strands of boyhood, stubbornly black and brilliant, just as they were on the day we first met. I could stare at him, all night long.
We would talk until early morning. I would tell him about my high school friends and he would tell me about his misadventures on his bike. I would tell him stories that would make us laugh till it physically hurt and we could laugh no more. Sometimes my stories ended with mascara stains on his t-shirt. He never seemed to mind. I would tell him about how terrible my life had been before I met him. How I had been hurt in the past. And how I had hurt others. But he would see that there was more to me than the stories I told him.. than the stories I told myself.
He melded the broken pieces of my life together.
He had turned my world into the highlight reel of the most romantic love story ever told. He filled them with moments where everything around us froze and the only sound we heard was of our raucous laughter. I have lived a million lifetimes in each one of those moments.
Every time I thought I had him all figured out, he would find a way to surprise me. And more in love with him, I would fall.
Then at some point, we would stop and have arguments about dinner.
“Well, what do you wanna eat?”
“Anything. You pick.”
“Come on.. I always pick.”
“Umm.. Chinese?”
“Nah, we just had that last week? How about some pizza?”
I suppose that happens to every couple. There is only so much you can learn about a person. Only so much fire to keep warm. Besides, you can’t live your whole life on fire. You would burn everything up around you. There are bills to pay. Ambitions to realize. Dreams to pursue.
Eventually, you become nothing but an intertwined and indistinguishable pile of messy fights and disappointments. It becomes easy to stop paying attention and turn on the auto-pilot.
That is when my eyes started to lose focus.
What if my heart breaks again?
It’s truly staggering what love can do to someone. I would never again write-off the cliches about love. They are real and they are dangerous. And they are all so beautiful.
I tried to leave him. I really did. I tried to forget him. I really did. I tried to break his heart. I really did.
We were to get married.
I think a lot of people were uncomfortable with it. Even though they loved us as individuals, I’m not convinced many believed in us as a union. Some of them expressed their concern, others didn’t.
It was tough to believe in us.
With the dark days came darker thoughts. Was I convinced that we together could handle everything that life was to surprise us with? And if I must, did I have it in me to throw away my dreams and aspirations? But more importantly, did I have it in me to love him forever?
I knew he did.
It’s complicated to love a person, and to have to make a choice:
Do you give up because it’s hard, but never actually let go because you are both comfortable?
Or do you fight to nurture it, even though the jokes are stale and the laughs are fewer?
Sometimes I close my eyes, picture him laughing, and I smile. My heart swells and I would give anything for it to burst so I can die with that feeling in my chest and his image in my mind.
I can’t un-love this man.
And I worry that he doesn’t even know it. I probably didn’t show it enough. I definitely didn’t tell it enough.
I keep staring at the bottom of my mug like there are words down there. I imagine them flailing as if they were stuck just below the surface waiting for me to rescue them from drowning.
Sometimes my truth is ugly and I will do anything at all to avoid putting it on paper. And just because I consciously recognize this resistance doesn’t make it any easier to overcome.
I wish he hadn’t given up. On me. On us.
I still feel it in his fingers. But not like the great raging fire that would burn me. More like the slow, dying fire in the hearth that creaks and ebbs. And as a deep silence reigns in, I lay here. Alone. Pulling my sweater around me a little closer.. leaving mascara stains on the pillow.
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