Total pages in book: 137
Estimated words: 131486 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 657(@200wpm)___ 526(@250wpm)___ 438(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 131486 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 657(@200wpm)___ 526(@250wpm)___ 438(@300wpm)
Our traumas, the things that injure us in this life, even over time, are not always behind us. Sometimes they linger in the smell of a newborn baby. They surprise us in the taste of a home-cooked meal. They wait in the room at the end of the hall. They are with us. They are present. And there are some days when memories feel more real than those who remain, than the joys of this world.
“Live long enough,” Dr. Musa says softly, “and you’ll lose people, things. We just need to learn how to deal with it in ways that aren’t isolating or destructive. You have to decide if being afraid of losing Yasmen again is worth never having her again.”
Since that night, I haven’t allowed myself to trust her. I thought she razed my life, but now I know she did what she did to save her own. Now I know I played a part. Now I understand that everything I saw in black and white was shaded, nuanced in ways I wasn’t in touch with my own pain enough to grasp. Now my feelings rise, unwilling to be denied.
Do people remember the exact moment they fall in love?
I’ve learned it’s not one moment, but a million of them.
I fell in love with Yasmen dreaming of our bright future over cheap Chinese food in a raggedy-ass apartment with no heat and shitty water pressure.
I fell in love with Yasmen a little more, a little deeper, every time she took me into her body, showed me how passion burns your tongue when you taste it.
When she rolled up her sleeves and poured her creativity, her matchless energy, into building a business together we can be proud of.
When she gave me our children and became a mother who made magic, who held up everyone else, carried the world on her shoulders with infinite grace. Even when she fell, she stayed; when everything urged her to give up and go, she stayed for us, and she fought until she found herself again.
I’ve fallen in love with the warrior woman who walked through fire, the one who came through stronger, reshaped by sorrow, reformed by grief, reborn in joy.
I think of her today with her small fist over my heart. She stood bravely in front of me asking that I take her back. Offering me the chance to have everything that really matters again—my home, my family, my wife. She offered it all to me on a platter, and I basically tossed it back in her face.
Panic rings a bell in my head and the sound of my own blood rushes in my ears like an alarm. The walls I’ve built to contain my feelings are falling. It’s not a wrecking ball that starts the demolition. It begins with a tremor, a realization that love happens in the fragile context of our mortality. That love and life occur just beyond the reach of our control. There is only one letter of difference between love and lose, and somewhere along the way, for me they became synonymous. I understand now that something broke in me after my parents died that somehow healed wrong, and I started measuring how much I loved people in terms of how much it would hurt to lose them.
Once the first brick topples, they all begin to loosen and collapse. It feels like every hurt, all the grief of a lifetime, falls on me in one landslide of emotion. In seconds, I’m standing in the ruins of all the things I thought would keep me safe from ever losing something precious again. It’s cathartic, this release and relief. It hollows out a trench inside me for waves of dammed pain to pass through.
The tissue Dr. Musa thrusts in my direction like a white flag startles me, and I look at him, confused.
“What’s that for?” I ask, my voice emerging like gravel.
He nods to my face with a faint smile. “For the tears.”
Chapter Forty-Four
Yasmen
In the kitchen alone, I assemble the ingredients for Byrd’s homemade mac and cheese. The uneven scrawl of her handwriting on the page of her old notebook blurs through the scrim of tears over my eyes. I don’t think I’ve gone ten minutes without crying since Josiah walked out the door a few hours ago.
“Dinner,” I say, swiping my cheeks with an impatient hand. “I’m going to make a meal for my children that they probably won’t eat because that’s just the kind of masochist I am.”
Haven’t I had my share of humiliation for the day? Or do I think I might top throwing myself at my ex-husband, begging him to move back in, declaring my undying love for him…and watching him storm from the room without a word? Because I suspect that will take the prize.
“Elbow noodles, cheese, milk, eggs, salt and pepper to taste.”