❛ i feel like the burden is being shifted back and forth. the burden of being the one who is pleased. ❜
❝ the burden. ❞ she cannot help but echo it back to him, for a moment lost as she considers how he always seems to find the words required to render most any feeling in every facet of itself. no side left unilluminated, no edge left unsharpened. it is fair, she thinks, for their peace to be painful. they were never supposed to have it. ❝ i think we can probably handle that. ❞ she worries that she is making light again, scraping away at some severity he means to instill in her, staring another warning in the face and willing herself not to see it, so that it cannot break what has been so delicately mended. it is work, even if she loves it. even if she prays for it to be true with eyes squeezed tightly shut on some mornings before she ever dares to roll over and confirm that he is there, that he exists in more than just the desperate vacuum of her mind, or a shifting vision in her periphery. he is there, finally a relic no longer — but being with him is not made any less of a challenge simply because it saves her.
there are cracks in the foundation that she can no longer see clearly, or contain. they arrive and assert themselves in the smallest of gestures : his hand will trace along the banister coming down the stairs, and for a moment she will think of the weathered one from the house in maryland. another day she will pass by where he is seated in the living room, reading a book he has already read, or perhaps one he had saved for this eventuality, one he dared not open before the opportunity to do so beneath a roof they both resided under had been won. earned. she will recall how many nights he avoided sleep. how many nights it would not come even if he did attempt it. how she lost the same nights in their staggering number, how both of them suffered and went on suffering, and might well have still been, given any small, shifted circumstance. on those days, the estrangement that he maintained, and even cultivated between them will come stealing in through those narrow fissures and meticulously loosen every carefully tightened bolt of her composure, throw open every latched well of emotion. she will resent him in one breath . . . and let it decay in the next. ❝ are you happier? ❞ she wants that, more than anything. infinitely more than a life clean of complications, or loss, or anger.
whatever anger there is will not survive beneath the burden of her relief, even if it should. even if whatever light there is between them will always cast another shadow, even if there are spaces that they will never again fill in one another . . . private hurts that are not within their power to heal. nothing survives the suffocating weight of what it means to her, that when he says this she can turn her hand to let her fingers touch his pulse. nothing can prise from her the notion that whatever there still is for her to experience, it is only worth experiencing with him. it is not owed to any sense of loneliness or grief that only he can comprehend, it is not owed to an inability to imagine life with someone else. she has imagined it. she had given it the effort that seemed to be expected, perhaps even owed. she has thought on more than one occasion that it might have been a kindness, to release him from her. that letting him go might do him more good than it could ever do for her, whether he would have wanted it or not. but she has always, from the beginning, been selfish. she has always wanted more than was proper, more than was offered, more than any person should assume themselves entitled to. it is impossible for her to parse how on earth he had seen his way past that to choose her, to set them on the path that culminates now beneath their feet when she steps closer, her palm resting gently over his heart as she chooses him, too, not for the last time.
