During the next few weekends I couldn’t stop myself. I had to come to the soup kitchen again and again, even though I wasn’t poor and hungry, even though I was the one who had built it. You had no idea who I was but your kind soul enveloped me. You learned my name and we started to communicate. A single touch here and there, a giggle at one of my not-so-funny jokes told me you felt the same way. You talked to all the homeless people, but I felt our conversations were special. I didn’t know what you saw in me, but I didn’t want to ask.
There was only one thing I wanted to know—whether you’ll have dinner with me. I didn’t expect a yes, but that was what I got. You didn’t hesitate. I invited you to one of the restaurants I owned, and you were shocked when I revealed to you my identity, that I went to the shelter just to be in the same room with you, to hear you laugh, to share the same air. By accepting my invitation, you had opened your heart to me, your world. Even if all we had was just one meal, you had given me everything. You saw beyond my lack of vision to my heart. I had so many blessings in my life and you were just the right person to share them with. When we kissed on our second date, you made me feel whole again. A month later you introduced me to Lizzie, your little girl. Six months later, we were a family. You gave to me, I gave to you. I loved you even if I could not see you with my eyes. It didn’t matter because I saw you with my heart, and I loved what I saw. We were a perfect match you and me.
PIECES OF FOREVER
I met you at a wedding, two pools of cornflower blue eyes across the marble reception hall. You wove your way through the throng of people toward me, as if our charges magnetized and you couldn’t resist. You asked me to dance and even though my heart resisted, I allowed you to sweep me across the dance floor. You guided me as if you knew my body better than I did, with the palm of your hand on the small of my back and your cheek close to mine. Our bodies swayed from side to side as if we had danced like that before a hundred times, without even knowing it. As the music rose and fell, as you lead me in every way, my raw and splintered heart urged me to step back, warned me that I was being sucked back into something I had been avoiding for three years. Three years after I lost faith in forever. Three years after my first love left me with nothing but a pale ring mark around my finger where the platinum band used to be, and smoke curling up around me after the fairytale I believed in burned out.
But despite the alarm bells in my head, I followed your lead, away from the past, towards a future I didn’t want to believe in. Being with you felt so right, made me forget for a moment how much damage two hearts can do to each other. Walks in the park, late night candlelight dinners, holidays in exotic places, and kisses that made my stomach swirl, led to a love that could not be denied. Our hearts longed to be together and I was powerless to resist. But when, after a romantic dinner at a seaside restaurant you gazed into my eyes and reached into your pocket, I knew what was coming. Without a thought I locked the doors of my heart. The diamond ring emitted a sparkle that matched the one in your eye. You wanted forever but I had lost faith in it a long time ago. I was happy with what we had, and terrified of what more you wanted from me.
I’d done it all before. The flowers and champagne, the wedding dress soft as a cloud, the “till death do us part.”
He broke the news to me with me standing at our bedroom door, his dry-cleaned clothes draped over my arm, an unfinished smile dead on my lips. As he attempted to pull his pants back up, he snapped my heart in two.
Their clothes were strewn across the floor like land-mines of cotton and silk while the woman he poisoned our marriage with cowered against the headboard, trying to disappear into the sheets I washed and ironed only the day before. I could smell her from where I stood—blossoms, sweat and shame.
“I made a mistake that I need to make right,” he said. Fool that I was, I thought his infidelity was the mistake. But the mistake was mine, to think that. His mistake, the one he apologized for now, was one he’d made a long time ago, when he left her. She had been the one all along, and they were getting married. Sorry I had to find out this way.
As bile rose up my throat, I felt my heart crack, shatter, and the weight of my heartbreak falling to my feet as I fell to pieces. As painful as it was, I realized one truth. For him, being married to me was a rehearsal for his real marriage to the one that got away. And I had been the prop all along. When the rehearsal ended, the music stopped, and the curtain fell, the prop was discarded, no longer wanted.
I walked out of his life determined to never be fooled again, to never believe in forever.
So, when you asked me to marry you, I couldn’t say yes. I needed time and you gave it to me.
Two weeks later, you died, and left a hole in the place my heart used to be.
You were gone before I could decide to wear your ring, to risk it all over again, only for you. I missed you with every fiber of my being, wept until I had no more tears left. I buried you along with my regrets. I should have said yes but I’d waited too long.
I kneeled on the ground next to your grave, eyes closed as I imagined your face, the dimple on your right cheek, the curve of your smile.
Hoping you would hear me, I whispered I love you and that I was sorry.
“Sorry about what?” Your voice replied, and I felt your arms envelope me.
My eyes flew open and I gasped. You were here, lying in my bed next to me, not under a mound of turned dirt. It had all been a dream.
“Yes,” I said as relief and happiness poured into my heart. “I will be your wife.” The pain of losing you was greater than my fears of loving and possibly losing love again. I wanted you, whether we had the whole of forever or just a piece.
MY LITTLE GIRL
I loved you before I met you, before I had the pleasure of gazing into your chocolate brown eyes, which shone like the surface of a lake coated with sunshine. Before I heard your laughter, so pure and unpolluted by life’s complications. The way your eyes sweep the room in search for me, the way your face splits into a grin when I enter the room, the curl of your fingers around my thumb. Those are the things that expand my heart and flood it with undiluted joy.
I didn’t only fall in love with you the first time you were placed in the crook of my arm. I fall in love with you every day, as if it’s for the first time. I’m far from being perfect, but I must have done something right to be gifted with the perfect slice of heaven that you are. I will love and cherish you always. Nothing is too big to sacrifice, if it means I would be protecting you.
Even when you grow up and let go of my hand, there’s a reserved spot on my shoulder that’s kept warm for any time you want to return home. With you in my life I don’t need to celebrate Mother’s Day once a year. Mother’s Day is every day I can call you my little girl.
A SLICE IN TIME
“How long? How long until…?” The words exited my mouth like splintered glass, grazing my throat and tongue.
Nurse Lara’s lips parted but nothing came out. Averting her gaze, she continued straightening the bed sheets. “The results will be ready tomorrow. The doctor will answer all your questions then,” Lara said gently, but in her eyes I saw the sympathy she felt for me and I knew.
“I need to know…please. Three years? Two? One?” I bit my lip, waited for an answer.
She looked up, and blinked. Her eyes said it all.
“I’ll bring you that glass of water. If you need anything else, ring the bell,” she said remorsefully and walked to the door.
I stared after her, watching her go. A tear slid from the corner of my eye, ran down my cheek bone and dripped in my ear. “I do need something,” I whispered. “A kidney.”
In the morning, the doctor brought me the news. He gave me only six months, if that, and left me weeping into my hands, wishing for the year that I had initially thought was too short.
If I could have a year to live, I’d travel to Africa, learn to surf, write a book. I’d watch my favorite comedy shows and laugh until my eyes watered and m
y stomach cramped. I’d push aside the hurt my ex-husband had inflicted on me and open my heart to someone new. I’d risk rejection and ask John Stevens, the surgeon with kind citrine eyes—the man I’d bumped into in the corridor and became friends with— to dinner in the hospital cafeteria, and I’d flirt, laugh at all his jokes, make eyes at him from across the table in a way that would make him wish we’d done this sooner.
If I had a year, I’d live harder than I’d done in thirty-five years. But my kidneys had thrown in the towel and closed for business. From the look of things, the hospital would be my last stop and I’d have to make peace with death. What choice did I have? By the time my name was reached on the kidney transplant list, I’d only be a memory.
Lowering my lashes, I daydreamed about a perfect life, the kind of life I’d have liked to have. Behind my eyelids, I could imagine anything. A beach wedding to Dr. Stevens, a suburban family home with a picket fence and porch swing. Making love in front of our marble fireplace, the birth of our baby girl, holding hands while we watched her graduate from college, sitting by the fire leafing through old albums.
“Crystal, can I come in?” His sexy, baritone voice interrupted my daydream.
My eyes flew open and heat flooded my cheeks. “John…of course come in.” For him, I’d brushed my butter-blond hair and tinted my lips with gloss. I attempted to pull myself to a sitting position but he laid me back down.
“You shouldn’t strain yourself. I just came to ask you something.”
I blinked and waited for him to continue.
He moved to the door and closed it. Then he returned to my bed and looked down, deep into my soul. “Working in this hospital and watching how life can be snuffed out in an instant has taught me to live with no regrets. There’s something I need to ask you or I’ll regret it for the rest of my life. Since the first time I saw you, I can’t get you out of my mind. The conversations we’ve had every time you came here never leave me. I want more. Will you have dinner with me?”
I parted my lips as my heart started to race. “What do you mean? You know I’m…”
“Dying?”
I didn’t say a word. He knew.
“Well, what if I told you that you might live after all?”
“Wh…what are you saying?” The words stuck in my throat.
“That you could live long enough to have not only dinner but many meals after that.”
My heart lightened and I gathered all the energy I had in me and my face split into a smile that soon faltered. “But the waiting list is so long?”
He sat down on the bed next to me and took my frail hand into his. “There’s someone who offered to donate a kidney just for you.”
“My God, who?” Tears spilled out of my eyes, warming my cheeks.
“Someone who wants you to live longer than a few months. Someone who wants to get to know you outside of this hospital bed. I was just approved to be your donor.”
I gripped his hand as my shoulders shook with emotion. “I didn’t know you were being evaluated.”
He gazed briefly at the door then lifted my hand and planted a kiss on my palm. A tear slid from his eyes to the place he’d just kissed. “I want to see more of you.”
I nodded and smiled as hope bloomed in my heart. But I was not naïve. Failure was a possibility. Although our hearts aligned, my body could reject his gift. But the surgery was a success, and John made me whole again.
FORGET LOVE
“Never marry for love, Lara” Mama said.
“But why marry at all, if not for love?” I frowned. “Isn’t that the whole point of marriage?”
Mama finished peeling the last potato and dropped it into a bowl of water. Her jaw was set, her brow knitted. She was here, yet so far away.
“Mama? Are you okay?”
“Yes, baby.” She switched on the stove. “I married your father for love. He promised me heaven but walked me through hell. Love is poison. If you don’t love, you don’t get hurt.”
“If not for love, why marry at all?”
“You marry for friendship not for love or romance. If you should love someone, it should be your babies. You don’t need romance to make those.”
I shook my head and laughed. “I’d rather love and get hurt than not love at all. I’d rather discover how it feels to have my heart filled than live a lifetime with an empty heart.”
“What if you get hurt?”
“Pain is a small price to pay for a moment of feeling completely alive. Even just a moment.”
“I guess you’ll have to make your own mistakes. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
I pushed back my chair and stood up from the table. “Just as there’s no guarantee that love will last, there’s no guarantee it will die.” I walked out of the kitchen with a smile on my face. Tim had asked me to marry him, I intended to say yes. Marrying him would mean marrying for both love and friendship. I guess, I’d have more going into marriage than my mother did thirty years ago.
EXPIRED LOVE
Today’s our anniversary. You came home drunk.
The romantic meal I had prepared cooled on the dining table, the wax on the candles dripping as if they, too, were mourning the end of an era. As if they knew they’d never be lit again.
As you fell at my feet, slurring “I’m sorry,” I wondered when we had turned into the road we vowed to never travel.
I had ignored the signs even though, for weeks, they’d been flashing at me from every side. There was no denying that you had unglued yourself from us, distanced yourself from the love we’d built. The tighter I held on, the harder I loved you, the faster you slipped away. The conversations had become shallow; with nothing else to say, we talked about the weather, our jobs, and other people’s lives. You’d stopped calling from work just to hear my voice, and the last time you said “I love you” is a distant memory.
Trying to ignore the stench of alcohol and the rot of our love, I cleaned you up and put you to bed. Before leaving the room, I kissed you on the lips knowing it would be for the last time. In the morning I’d give you your wish. I’d walk away. I’d rather leave before our love became something I didn’t recognize. I would take with me the memories, instead of watching them being poisoned by a marriage gone sour.
• • •
With my bags and pieces of my heart packed, I stood at the door. “This is goodbye.” No need to explain because you’d known it was coming. Maybe you’d wished for it to happen.
You simply nodded, but I was shocked to see the pool of sadness in your eyes. Why would you ache for something you no longer wanted? Why would you hurt and still watch me walk away?
Tears blinded my vision as I drove down the road of broken promises. But inside my heart, our love story would remain unspoiled. Inside my heart, I would go on loving you as the man you once were, not the man you had become. Though our love story had expired, the memories remained.
LOVE ALIVE
“Do you still love, Grandpa?” I asked my grandma. We were sitting on the porch as we did most mornings after breakfast. She was in the rocking chair and I sat at her feet, with my legs tucked underneath me.
“I’ll never stop loving him,” she replied. She didn’t look up from her knitting and my gaze stayed fixed on the two sparrows cuddling up to each other on the picket fence.
“But he’s dead. Doesn’t love die?”
“Love lives inside people. My love for your grandpa lives inside me. As long as I’m alive, it will be alive.”
I turned to her then, my innocent ten-year-old eyes gazing up into her lined face. “Did Grandpa love you?”
“Yes, he did.” Grandma smiled. “We both loved each other very much.”
“But now that he’s no longer alive, is his love for you dead, too?”
Grandma put away the knitting and asked me to sit on her lap. She was quiet for a long time as she unbraided my long, blond hair. “I don’t think so. I think, when your grandpa died, his love left his body and it’s now
joined with mine. I get to keep it alive.”
“Grandma,” I said, tipping my face up to gaze at hers again. “When you die, can I have your love to keep?”
Grandma laughed. “I’d give you mine, but I have the feeling there won’t be space in your heart. It will already be filled with someone else’s love.”
BEGINNING AT THE END
We met for dinner to celebrate the end. The decision had been made, and we could move on. The strings that had linked us had been snipped; the vow that bound us was dissolved. The divorce was final. We could walk away and start afresh, but we had time for one last goodbye. Our marriage had broken but we didn’t hate each other.
I sipped my glass of champagne but you didn’t touch yours. Instead, you gazed at me through the spark of the candle light. There was something in your eyes I couldn’t quite read.
“You okay?” I asked, picking up my knife and fork. “Something wrong?”
“I’m just trying to imagine a life without you. You were part of me for thirty years.”
I swallowed hard. “I’ve been wondering the same thing about you. We were so in love once.” You had been my first love and I didn’t know how I’d ever love anyone as deeply as I’d loved you.
You shook your head and your black hair glinted in the light. You were still every bit as handsome as the first day I met you. “What do you think went wrong?”
“Marriage…I think. Once we tied the knot it all went wrong, almost as if the knot had been tied too tightly and our love couldn’t breathe.”
“Now that the knot has been untied, how do you feel? Can you imagine a life without us?”
I shook my head and tears spilled out of my eyes. “I cannot. I feel lost already.”
One Page Love Story- Share the Love Page 14
