To Be One in Love and Grief
It wasn’t so much that he returned home every night to find her in bed already, as it was that she didn’t bother to acknowledge his return.
Opening drawers with urgency, closing them as if in haste, murmuring the words of his favorite poem; some nights he made these loud noises hoping to elicit a response from his wife, Yasmin.
Dinner was always left for him in the microwave. It was a sign that she still cared, one that he would hold on to every night his mind traveled to the events that led them to where they are now.
One morning, Abdullah wakes up to find his wife staring at him with a nebulous expression on her face.
“Going to work today?”, she asks
“Yes, I — ”
“It’s the weekend.”
“I need the extra hours to make up for — ”
“Never mind. Breakfast will be ready soon.” Yasmeen says as if meals were the only thing that kept them together. She walks off and he attempts to call her back but he knows not to try.
For months, they’ve breathed in the same heaviness that almost stifles whatever love they still had left for each other. Almost.
Abdullah walks out of his apartment, it is a sunny afternoon and his shift starts in an hour.
His steps lead to the park where he visited on the weekends with Hamza. He remembers the day he returned from work early to surprise Hamza and his mother.
“Daada Daada!”. Abdullah recalls Hamza screaming excitedly as his father approached him.
“What a child!” He thought to himself that day, almost bursting with joy.
It was only an accident, they said. The child was unsupervised so you can’t sue the driver, they insisted. “Take some time off work to take care of your wife”. But who would take care of him?
Yasmeen was inconsolable in the early days. It helped that the house was always filled with relatives and friends that offered consolation in the ways they knew how: food, money, and words. For a while, it was enough.
Soon, they stopped coming. Yasmeen and Abdullah woke up every morning to silence. Hamza’s voice, still ringing in their heads, was loud enough to keep them from talking to each other. Grief was a guest that overstayed his welcome, but what broke him more was the woman he could no longer call his.
Everyone told him to be strong for Yasmeen. To love her more and be there when she needed him. He tried, he failed.
He wanted to scream at each one of them, “I was his father, I’m grieving too!”. He wanted to hold Yasmeen in his arms, beg her to allow him to be weak too, to be one in their grief together. But each time she looked at him, he saw her eyes shift as if she made a mistake looking at a man she once called hers.
He thought about how he almost told his wife this morning that he pretended to go to work the weeks following Hamza’s death but he always found himself at his grave, standing over the tombstone in a conversation with his son that was no longer alive.
“You know, I carry fuzzy the Elephant with me everyday. Almost feels like you’re there.”
Silence.
The conversations were like daily journal entries of grief, only that he read them aloud and tried so hard to imagine his son of three years was listening to him narrate how his absence had torn his world apart.
Abdullah is on the bus when he hears his phone beep. He pulls out his phone to see a text from Yasmeen.
“Our marriage is no longer working for us”.
He puts his phone away, not surprised at the message but not willing to focus on it. He hears another beep.
The sun sets on a man walking to the spot where he first laid eyes on the woman he would come to marry. It is the corner of a bookstore centered in the city.
It wasn’t love at first sight for these two, it was a love that grew as a reader’s interest grows in a book she started just a few minutes before bedtime.
Abdullah walks to the spot to relive the memory of that day. Yasmin is there to find her way back. Years later, Abdullah would smile thinking of this moment where he found Yasmeen with her back facing him. But now, he walks up to her.
“Hey”. Yasmeen looks back, startled to hear a familiar voice.
“Hi, I didn’t know you would be here.” He nods in response.
She takes his hands in hers as if holding on to a man she still calls hers.
There was nothing Abdullah could do to hold back the tears.
Before they sleep that night, Abdullah kisses her forehead. Yasmeen looks up to him with eyes exhausted from crying but she smiles. There and then, he felt the months of grief melt away.
Moments later, Yasmeen is asleep and Abdullah stands up to plug in his phone. That’s when he reads the second message she sent him earlier.
“I love you, let’s try to make it work please”.
