Frighteningly, unnervingly normal.
He’s taping the bottom of a box with a focused efficiency. His movements clean and precise, like they are when he puts his mind to it. He’s present. Every now and then, he even smiles at his phone, at some silly video. It’s not like him at all. Did I imagine everything? His bitterness? His anger? To justify moving?
The silence between us is not sharp any more. It is soft. It stretches like a blanket. I almost forget we fought.
‘Remember this?’ he asks, his voice pulling me from my thoughts. He’s holding up a ridiculous, oversized ceramic frog from a pile of decorative junk I’d forgotten I owned. Its painted smile is chipped, its googly eyes lopsided.
We’d bought it at a roadside stall on a rare trip out for groceries in those first few months. It was what Megha would do, he had said. I had told him it would be my gift, that I would eventually pay him back for it, but as it was always the case with him, he didn’t ask and I didn’t offer. There are many little debts that I owe him.
‘Oh yes!’ I laugh, taking it from him. The ceramic is cool and heavy in my hands. ‘It’s even uglier than I remember.’
‘Can you imagine this was mass produced? Like hundreds of these are across houses? And they all bought it unironically?’ he says, a small, genuine smile touching his lips.
It’s a real smile, one that reaches his eyes. The sight of it is so rare, it feels like a punch to the gut. We’re smiling? Sitting on the floor of what I had believed to be the wreckage of my departure, and we’re smiling? For a second, I want to stop time. I want the boxes to vanish. I want us to stay like this.
Why am I leaving then? If smiling is possible in this house? If this is no longer the site of a grief group, why do I have to leave the house? The moment is so strange, so filled with a sad, tender nostalgia, that it makes my chest hurt. This is what it could have been. This is what we’re losing.
Why couldn’t we live like this?
He reaches into another box, this one filled with books, and pulls out a stack of thin paperbacks with titles likeThe Five Stages of GriefandHealing After Loss.The books we had picked out together. Ordered off Amazon. Ripped out of their packets but never read completely.
‘Remember this? Month two,’ he says.
‘Our “we can fix this with books” phase.’
The nights we spent reading passages aloud to each other, searching for a road map, a set of instructions for how to survive. But we always gave up midway, complaining that noone knew pain as much as we did. That this is kids’ stuff. In the Olympics of grief, our team of him and me had all the golds.
‘We were so lost,’ he says.
I look at him. His face is calm. Too calm. I wait for the mask to slip, but it doesn’t.
‘We thought a book could be a life jacket, keep us from drowning. How silly,’ he says quietly. ‘But take them.’
Later, I pull a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle half-finished in its box from under the sofa. An impossible landscape of a blue sky. ‘And this?’
‘That,’ he says, ‘was month five. This will be the answer to our anxiety. Keeping ourselves... busy.’
I remember the only hour we spent on this, heads bent over the table, not speaking, just searching for the right piece, the right fit, trying to make something whole again. We never finished it. The sky was too big, too empty. There were too many pieces missing. And then it remained on the table for a couple of more months. The maid was forbidden to touch it.
We kept saying we would come back, fix it, and we neverdid.
The unfinished puzzle lies heavy in my lap. It feels like amirror.
Later, I find him in the kitchen, with a cup of coffee. I have to ask the question I’m terrified to ask, but I have to.
‘I thought you’d be... I don’t know, angry,’ I say quietly, leaning against the doorframe.
He doesn’t look at me, just continues to stir the coffee, his movements slow and deliberate.
‘I’m sad, Aditi. Of course I’m sad.’ He finally turns, his eyes meeting mine. ‘But I’m not unreasonable. You have to build a life. You can’t do it here. It’s fine.’
The word ‘fine’ feels like a lie. But it is a kind lie, and I takeit.
‘Raghav . . .’
‘I know I’ve been an asshole,’ he continues, cutting me off. ‘I know I’ve been... bitter. But that’s my problem, not yours. You shouldn’t feel guilty for this.’
His maturity is a gut punch. It makes my decision to leave feel like a betrayal.
