I had tried to answer, tried to form words that would explain the crater that had opened up where my heart used to be. The way I’d been walking around feeling like I was missing limbs.
Instead, what came out was: “Kelechi’s getting married in April.”
The words tasted like poison in my mouth, like admitting something that would make it more real than it already was.
Her face had gone through a series of expressions: confusion, understanding, then something close to grief.
She’d sunk onto my couch, pulling me down beside her with the gentle insistence of someone who’d been mopping up my disasters since we were kids.
“Oh, honey,” she’d murmured, and her arms had come around me like a shield against a world that suddenly felt too full of things I couldn’t have. “I’m so sorry, I’m so fucking sorry you’re going through this.”
I began crying then.
Ugly sobs that came from somewhere deeper than tears, from the place where hope goes to die.
She held me while I shook apart, her hand stroking my hair the way my mother used to when I was small, when the world felt too big and too cruel for someone my size.
“I know this doesn’t help right now,” she’d said into my hair, “but maybe this is just how it has to be. Sometimes life is cruel in ways that don’t make sense. Sometimes the people we love can’t love us back the way we need them to.”
I’d pulled away then, wiping my face with the back of my hand, my skin raw and hot.
“I thought she’d choose me. God, Atlas, I actually thought she might choose me.”
Atlas had stayed quiet for a long moment, just looking at me with those blue eyes that had seen me through every stage of my life.
“Love isn’t always enough, Mar. I wish it was, but sometimes it isn’t.”
Now, sitting on this bench with cherry blossoms falling around me like snow, I could feel those same tears building behind my eyes.
My finger traced the outline of her face on the screen, following the curve of her cheek, the line of her jaw that I’d kissed a thousand times.
“Maybe in another lifetime,” I whispered to the empty air, to the universe that had decided I wasn’t allowed to keep the one thing that had ever made me feel complete. “Maybe in another lifetime, you would have been brave enough to choose me.”
The tears came then.
Hot and unstoppable.
Falling onto the phone screen until her face became a watercolour blur of brown skin and white satin and all the dreams I’d been stupid enough to believe in.
I cried for the future we would never have.
For the mornings, I would wake up alone without her next to me.
I cried until the kid with the kite went home and the park grew quiet around my grief.
And even then, I couldn’t stop.
XXII
“Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.”
— James Baldwin
Chapter Twenty-Three
Kelechi
“You’ve been so quiet the entire evening. Are you sure you’re okay being here?” Chukwuma’s voice pulled me from the mental sanctuary I’d retreated to, that secure place where I could pretend I was anywhere else but here.
