44/
what silence is made of
alyssa
I satin my car outside the church for twenty minutes before I finally accepted he wasn’t coming.
I stared at the church doors, watching other people walk in carrying their own grief and trauma and hope for healing. He wasn’t here. He wasn’t getting help anywhere. He was just... gone.
A week ago, I thought I was being brave. I thought I was fighting for the man I loved. Because that’s what he was. I’d fallen in love with Julian Wade completely. Terrifyingly. Irrevocably.
He’d been my person. The one who saw through all my walls and loved me anyway. And I’d destroyed it. For nothing. He was exactly where he’d been before, except now he’d learned not to trust me. Now he knew I’d manipulate him if I thought I knew what was best for him.
Our relationship had been working. We were happy. We’d both grown to become softer, more open, gradually letting each other deeper into our lives. But I’d been too impatient. Convinced that I could save him from himself.
I wiped my face and started my car. As I pulled out of the parking lot, I caught myself looking for his Mercedes, or his Range Rover one more time. Some pathetic part of me still hoping he might show up late, that maybe this whole thing had been worth something.
But the parking lot stayed empty, and I drove home knowing the truth:
I’d lost the love of my life for absolutely nothing.
Three weeks wasa strange amount of time. Long enough that his shape went out of the house — the second coffee cup I reached for and put back, the side of the bed that stayed made — and short enough that my body hadn’t accepted any of it, so I kept reaching and putting back,reaching and putting back, learning the same loss every morning like it was news.
The first few days I called it a cooling-off. Julian went quiet, thought a thing to the bottom, came back when he’d solved it. Any morning now the phone would light up with his name and some flat, careful sentence that meant he was ready. By the end of the first week I stopped telling myself that. By the second I understood it for what it was, and it was not a cooling-off. He hadn’t gone quiet to think.
He had left me.
And I hadn’t called him either. I had not picked up the phone and dialed the man because every time I reached for it I heard us in his kitchen saying we need space, and I couldn’t be the one to take it back, and apparently neither could he, and so the silence just went on holding itself up between us with nobody willing to be the first to knock it down.
I went to work. I made Micah’s lunches and signed his folder and laughed in the right places, and I was, by every visible measure, fine. I had a lifetime of practice at fine. The only person who’d have known the difference was the one I wasn’t speaking to.
Tuesdays were ours.For months Julian would meet me at Maple’s at twelve-thirty, the back booth by the window, the one standing thing on either of our calendars that never moved. He’d come in still on his phone, hold up a finger, finish the call, and then put the phone face-down on the table and give me the hour. Face-down. That was the part I’d let myself need without admitting I needed it.
He wouldn’t be there. I knew he wouldn’t be there. I drove over anyway, and I dressed for it, and I hated myself the whole way, because underneath the knowing was a smaller, hungrier thing, and the hope wasn’t that he’d be in the booth. The hope was worse than that. The hope was that it had worked. That somewhere in these weeks he’d done the thing — found a room, found a person, sat down and started — and that he’d walk in carrying it, lighter, and I’d find out I hadn’t blown up the best thing in my life for nothing. That the cost had bought something.
I sat in our booth. I faced the door. The waitress knew me and didn’t ask if I was waiting for anyone, just left two menus and the bread and a soft look I couldn’t stand. I watched the door for forty minutes. Every time the bell over it went I looked up, and every time it wasn’t him, my heart dropped a little further.
I ordered so I’d stop being a woman holding a table for nobody. The food came and I moved it around. My throat had been closed for three weeks and it didn’t open for a bowl of pasta. I’d had a good man. A good man who tried to love me in the only ways he’d ever been allowed, and I’d pushed at the shape of it, and called my own fear independence, and when it cost me I’d handed him an exit dressed as a boundary and he’d walked through it. This part was mine. Whatever else was true, this part I’d built with my own hands.
I went to the bathroom before the drive home, because I was not going to cry in the Maple’s lot like a teenager. I was going to do it somewhere with a door that locked.
I came out of the stall and Sabrina was at the sink.
Of course she was. On the worst day, in the lowest minute, the universe had Sabrina West at the mirror with her lipstick out like she’d been cast for it.
She caught me in the glass and smiled, and the smile was too ready, like she’d had it loaded before I came out.
“Hi, sis.”
“Sabrina.”
“Trouble in paradise?”
I went to the next sink and turned the water on. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“No?” She didn’t move, enjoying her own patience. “Your face does. And the fact that you spent your whole lunch in that booth by yourself. Everybody knows you and Julian eat here every Tuesday. Same little table by the window, regular as church. And here you are, picking at a plate you didn’t touch.” Her head tilted. “So where’s your man, Alyssa?”
I kept my eyes on my hands under the water.
