Ever Felt Like You’re Not Enough For Your Lover?
a story about loss, grief and pain
I’ve been feeling that way lately. I’m all she used to need, or at least I could provide them. It made me complete, made me feel like a man. But something changed. I can see it in her eyes, they do not accuse but I can read my incompetency in them. I can sense it in the air when we’re together. We still talk and proceed like normal, I doubt she has noticed this change, but I see it in her eyes. My incompetency.
Perhaps I read those eyes wrong, but how so? I’ve read them right for the years we’ve loved each other, for the years we’ve been friends. It was hard work learning to read them and decipher her needs before she spoke them, harder work than providing for those needs, but it was rewarding and fulfilling. I could tell her needs and wants just by looking into her eyes and I provided.
Now I look into those eyes and I don’t understand what I read in them, I don’t understand how to provide what she needs. My ego won’t allow me to bring it up for fear of making it real, but it’s real. So real it thickens the room, brittles the hair on my hands, makes my mouth sour and kicks me in my stomach. I’ve learnt to be a man, to provide everything my lover needs, but now I do not know or understand what she needs.
Something inside her has been broken, I know losing our child did that; I had been there when he broke, when she forced him out, the agony in her voice as she pushed him forth, the joy in her eyes when he had come, the confusion that followed when he didn’t cry, the disbelief as she looked at the doctor’s downcast eyes, refusing to let the realization set in. I had hugged her as her screams followed the nurse who took our child away. She had had to be sedated, her heavy tears and screams piercing the hospital walls, calling the new infants to wail with her. And they did. The cries! Cries that rocked your soul so violently, I didn’t shed a tear; I had to be a man, but those cries rocked my soul so violently I knew it wished to leave. To where? I do not know. After our lost child or away from such cries? I do not know.
It had taken three days of heavy sedation for her to calm down. I had sat beside her, stroking her hair and rubbing her cheeks, because even sedated, she cried. If it had rocked my soul so violently, I do not know what it did to hers. When she woke up, we talked, first about light things like the weather and the view outside her window. She had been the one to bring up the subject, said she had cried enough and felt better. Her eyes told me she lied, but she had come to accept and was ready to move, so I kissed her cheek.
The lie left her eyes as we left the hospital, almost re-surging when she passed by a new mother, but she had dismissed it. I had wanted to avoid that and made us pass a longer route, but some things can’t be avoided. The days as we got home saw the lie leave entirely.
It was replaced by this thing I do not know or understand. They never prepare you or train you to provide for such.
