Everything We Haven't lost: A Short Story

[image error]

I am sprawled. It’s way, way too early for me to be conscious. Through the drapes, the sun is invading my room. The world is screaming, screaming at me to join them. Join us! I can hear them. Become a part of this, this! You’re missing everything!

My hair is over my face and greasy from being up all night. It’s dyed blonde and usually shines. The sweat of a heated argument will do that. It’s over, for the most part, and we can get back to being civilized creatures who hate one another. We’ve both fought for hours and now all there just isn’t a whole lot left. I’m sitting against my headboard, supported by a small stack of pillows. My legs are just out there. I’m still wearing the dress I was out last night in, out dancing with that other guy, Mark. I’ve been seeing for a few months now. I think we discussed him around midnight, though I wasn’t exactly timing things.

On the other side of the bed—supporting himself with his left shoulder—was Alan. His hair was the typical dark and short, that well-worn cut that works for just about any confidence level. It was, since hours ago, a terrible mess. All he wore now were tight dark jeans, the kind in those fall collection commercials. We’re both half naked because as the night passed, it only became hotter and hotter in my place.

What we had here was a little crisis. It’s over now, I think. It lasted hours, this fight we had. All the years Alan and I knew each other, we never fought like this. There was fire in our eyes, feeling to our defenses, things inside of us that I had thought were long gone. About an hour ago, we both stopped yelling, after hours of it—not from defeat, but from being drained. It was all gone, every ounce of fight we had in us. The neighbors banged on the walls, pleading for us to quiet down. “I’m glad we did that,” I said, quietly. I was sure, too. I was glad. I hadn’t felt “glad” in months. Alan looked at me with those eyes. Now, after all that, there was little else in them but understanding.

“Me too,” he said.

“Do you mean that?” I was sure, but I couldn’t be like that about him. Even if this fight had brought us closer than we had been in years, I still couldn’t just trust his word. I thought of all the lies we talked about tonight, both his and mine.

“Yeah,” he said, with little energy. But what could be expected? “It’s not often you get a chance.”

“A chance?” I asked, only later realizing that I interrupted him.

“Imean,achancetodothis.Tojustgetitallout. Some of that, what we talked about, you know? It’s been in there for years.” Alan’s voice was tender and honest now, much the same as mine. “Do you think we can move on now?”

I tongued each of the words against the top of my mouth. That was something we did not discuss. But that’s not how he phrased it. Move on, I thought. From each other? With each other? Away from our past, I’m sure he meant that. Away from seven years of off and on, of affairs and lies. Away from what we were. But were we any different now? Can one night of brutal honesty change a person?

“I don’t know, Alan. I don’t know what it is to move on. I can’t say goodbye, if that’s what you mean. I’m awful at it. But I don’t know about us.”

He nodded, and looked like he was thinking of a comeback.

Alan and I met in college, first day, first class. He sat beside me in my morning Psychology lecture. There must have been a thousand seats in that auditorium. We thought it was fate. I had my apprehensions at first, coming from a small town into the big city, and having this boy follow me around everywhere. He was relentless. We talked all night—kind of like tonight, but completely different—every time we had a chance. We would watch the sunrise and kiss the afterglow. Today, we were much too tired to enjoy that blinding sun just outside my bedroom window. It was covering the middle of the bed now, that light. It was June and hot.

I saw that Alan was about to say something, but I cut in front, “Do you, I mean, can you say definitely that you’d like to know me? Not that you don’t, but I mean, to continue to know me?” I barely got it out, but I needed to cross out the chances of a definite yes or no from him. I couldn’t handle that either way.

Alan closed his mouth and drank in the question. I could see him silently constructing something. His eyes narrowed and tilted towards the ceiling. He said, “Because it would be a lie, wouldn’t it? Either way. For you or me, to say something like ‘no, I don’t want you in my life’ would be a lie.”

“I never said that,” I said, not expecting that kind of response. “I never said it would be a lie, I meant, how can we be sure?”

“And I meant that how can we be sure we’re not lying? And not me lying to you, I mean to ourselves. You know that inward lie you make when you really want to convince yourself that what you’re doing is right? If I were to stand up on this bed right now, raised my arms and declared ‘Julia Rose, I need you in my life!’ I might want to believe it. And when I say it, you may believe it, but inside, deep down in those dark caverns we’ve dug, it may not be true.

“We could embrace right now, and let the world know it, and get married again and go to Spain for a honeymoon and have children—when you’re ready—two or three of them, a girl and two boys or the opposite, all of them beautiful little kids, and grow old together and end up in some retirement home, we could still end up hating each other again. Somewhere along that line, I might just get tired of you, or pissed off or fall in love with someone else, someone neither of us have met yet, and then I’ll ruin everything, and what I’ve said today, this very morning, would be just another lie I told you.”

“Alan,” I said, a little surprised that all that could come out of a man so exhausted, “You couldn’t get up right now if you wanted to. I know I can’t. Face it, there’s nothing left in us. There is no more chance to lie. There’s no room in us for anything but what we got left, and that isn’t much. We just spent an entire night throwing every possible chance for more out, at each other, at speeds I didn’t know we could achieve.” Hell, I was surprised to find some more fight in myself. I didn’t know which cavern deep down in me this was coming from.

“I’m twenty seven, Alan,” I said, with more of a whimper than anything, “I’m too tired to play these games with you. We’ve been married for five years now, and we’ve both had two affairs. Over the last six months, I’ve seen more of Mark and you’ve seen more of Jessica than we’ve seen of each other. I want to stop, Alan. I want to stop being such an unhappy woman. I don’t care what I have to do to stop it. I don’t care if I lose Mark. I’ll lose you if I have to. We’ll divorce if that’s what it takes. I won’t fight for an entire night again with you. I’m not doing that ever again. I don’t have it in me.” Outside, I could hear the vendors screaming. They were yelling, “I have a good deal right here!”

At seven in the morning, your play-book is used up. All the jukes and runs, all the passing plays, all the special teams, they’re gone. When you’ve thrown the book out because it’s useless to you, when there is no more inside you that you know can work, the moves you make after that, well, that determines what kind of person you are. It’s what you can do after you’ve done it all. With Alan, I’d used every defense I could. I brought up every incident, big and small, that had happened between us in seven years. And I won’t take anything away from him, he fought me just as hard. He gave everything I’d ever seen him give. But I knew who I was much better than who he was.

He had met me on my doorstep last night, after my night out with Mark, and said that we needed to sort some things out. I let him in because it was raining hard, that kind of pour you can’t escape. I was in a great mood before I saw him. I was walking on air. Mark had been great last night. It was one of the best dates we’d had. My smile soured as soon as I put the key into the lock. We rode the elevator up silently, me wondering what just all this was about, him presumably plotting out his moves. He complimented the apartment, and noticed all the little changes I’d made. The pleasantries didn’t take long. I didn’t offer him a drink. We didn’t drink all night. What came out between us had been boiling, waiting for so long. It wasn’t perfect timing at all, but it was everything it could be. I thought—hoped—that maybe he had come to apologize for everything. All I ever wanted out of it all, after any of the dust settled anyway, was an apology. I bet he wanted one too. Instead, he said he wanted to sort everything out. So, with me tired but in a light mood from the evening, we began from the beginning. Psychology class. Then to his dorm room. Then to my dorm room. Then our first apartment. Meeting one another’s parents. Going on trips together. To the mountains, and skiing above the heavens. What mattered now wasn’t that he cheated first, or that I didn’t want a child when we had the chance, or that we still wore our fucking wedding rings.

“Do you still love me?” I asked. I don’t know why I did. He smirked, “That’s not the point here.” “I know it’s not the point. But I just want to know. Can you tell me, now, after all this? After we’ve briefed each other on our entire lives? Can you say it?”

“Julia, love isn’t the issue here. It’s living. It’s surviving. You just said it. You need to move on. I need to move on. You’ve never had trouble finding love.”

“I don’t want to find love, Alan. I want to know if you have it.”

“I don’t fucking believe this,” he said, and sat up, stood, and walked over to the window. He creaked it open a little. “Down there,” he pointed, “Down there, a million people are in and out of love. Nobody dies over it. You want to survive? You don’t need it. We’ve been dodging this forever.”

“So why still do it? All night, we never said anything about it. Why can’t we now?”

“Because it’s pointless!” He closed the window, shut it down with might I figured was gone before the morning came. The plays you make after you’ve made them all can be terrifying.

“Alan, don’t get angry. We don’t need this.” With the window closed, the outside world was denied this space, and us without it. It was deathly quiet. The air conditioner, sticking out a window in the living room, it hadn’t kicked on yet.

“What do we need?” In my head, the song all you need is love began playing, the soft piano strokes echoing between my ears. I hadn’t heard it recently, and hadn’t thought of it as that much of a catchy song before, the kind that sticks in your head for painfully long amounts of time. Still, there it was.

“Just say it, Alan, please.”

He came toward me, until he was only a few feet away, “I love you! So There!” Alan’s breathing got heavy, and it looked as if he was about to fall over at any moment, “When you cheated on me I loved you. When you lied. When your…when our child died inside you, when you made it happen,Jesus,Ilovedyou. IknowI’vedoneallthistoo,the lying, everything, and I hated you sometimes. I hated you. But that wasn’t enough. Hating you couldn’t get rid of it. Love. That fucking word. It means you, Julia. Jesus!” Alan was walking around the room during this. Alan, caged animal, was frequently throwing his hair back and letting his hands fly with his mannerisms. “Fuck.” He uttered as he fell, collapsed really, down to his knees on the hardwood. The movements you make can be breathtaking.

All you need is love was halfway through in my head when I got off the bed, came down to him, and put his head to my heart. We hadn’t touched all night, and the force of it went through me. We touch! It’s possible, after all this time! I wrapped my arms around him. We embrace! It can happen after all! I thought, everything was going to be okay. Beneath me, Alan was crying again. I held him with all I had.

We moved back to the bed. I grabbed the half-finished box of tissues from the night-table. “Thank you,” he said. I smiled.

“You see how that meant something?” he nodded. I said, “I didn’t think it would mean that much.”

“Really,” he looked at me with a suspicious leer, “What did you think it would mean?”

“I just wanted you to say it. I thought you could do it without breaking into an emotional outburst.”

“It was not an emotional outburst,” he said, half laughing, handing me back the tissue box, “it was an emotional outcry. And it was what I felt, what I needed to say, at that moment anyway. But we’re not anywhere new here. You knew I loved you.”

“Yes,” “And I know you love me.” “Do you?” “Don’t I?” “How can you be sure?” “Don’t do this to me, Jules.” He called me that whenever

he thought it would be cute. I hadn’t heard this particular nickname in years. Since we stopped getting along so well, a year or two after the marriage, he had come up with other names to call me.

“Alan, I’m not doing anything. Just, don’t assume that because you love me that I love you.”

“But you do.” “Are you asking me?” “I am now.” I decided to make him wait for it, because I could see that

I had him on a string. I could have crushed him. I could have really done damage, and even though I didn’t really want to, I couldn’t help but revel in the few seconds of possibility.

“Of course I love you, Alan, but that’s not the point.”

“We’re going in a circle.” He said, frustrated at my comment. I gave him a little shove, letting him know that the atmosphere in here was no longer one of hostility and one of warmth. There should be understanding, peace, maybe happiness if we were lucky here. Though, one can only wish for so much. All you need is love had wrapped up four times in my head, and began again after a few seconds.

“I need to get this song out of my head,” I said, “It’s what’s going in a circle.”

“You are good at changing the subject.”

“I’m not changing the subject. We’ll get back to it in a second. Just help me out here.”

“Can’t it wait? We’re in kind of an important part of our conversation.”

“What? The love thing? It can wait a few minutes, anyway.”

“Yeah, you’re right. It’s just the love thing,” Alan repeated, sarcastically. The song was becoming stinging since I mentioned it. “Fine then. What’s the song?”

I said, sheepishly, “All you need is love.”

Alan laughed, “That would be it, wouldn’t it? It couldn’t be something by Meatloaf or The Pixies. It couldn’t be that horrible jingle McDonald’s has for all it’s ads.”

“That wouldn’t be very fitting, would it? Imagine, us arguing about love and our horrible relationship, while inside, I’m really thinking that maybe I should just go out and get some Chicken McNuggets.”

“Now that you mention it…” “No, Alan.” “I was joking.” “I know.”

“Can we do that?”

“What, joke?”

“Yeah.”

“Alan…”

“I know. We’re in a serious situation here, we shouldn’t take it lightly. I know. It’s just, it’s so heavy in here. The air.”

“Open the window then. You’re the one who closed it.”

“That’s not what I meant. I mean the air between you and me. This tension. You know it, you know what I’m talking about. You can’t have what we have without this air.” I nodded, not really agreeing but feeling too weak to engage in disagreements that didn’t really mean anything. I had to pick and choose wisely, now. Sleep had formed around my eyes.

“So, getting back to the lies.”

“The lies?” he asked. I was ready to get on with it, even if the song was still repeating. I’d get rid of it later. I’d listen to the radio or something else awful.

“Yes,” I said, “The lies. You said, even if we did promise to love each other and make everything work and, hell, have babies and soccer practices and old folks homes, as you delicately put it, we’d be lying.”

“I said we could be lying. How would we know?”

“Well of course how would we know? There’s always that possibility of changing everything.”

“That whole every-moment-of-your-life thing, right?”

“Right.” I remembered the half a dozen movies where that little tag line was used in the preview. Watch as our hero makes the choice, the choice of a lifetime… The overuse tended to water down the meaning, but I still usually paid for the ticket. And this was no movie. For years, Alan liked to say that. “This is real life,” he’d say, “There’s no script here.” I don’t know what he ever meant by it. The randomness of our actions maybe. But maybe it was the striking absence of any hero.

“Well, I’ve got a point.”

“Of course you’ve got a point, Alan. You can make that fucking vague philosophy work for any couple. You can make it work for anyone who says they’ll never do any particular thing ever again. You could take someone who quit smoking, who promised the world they would never light up again, and make a great psychological argument that this particular person could be lying to us all. Because until that person dies, is cold in their casket or burning in some incinerator, they have the chance, Alan, the chance to lie, to light up again. She can get a pack from any corner store, and ruin everything. And that’s just like us, Alan. At every opportunity, we could lie to each other. We could find other lovers, hell, you could find them at any street corner, and that would ruin everything.” I paused for a second, put with my eyes I let him know I wasn’t finished. I just had to catch my breath. “Alan, I love you. But I loved you when I was with Mark, too. When I was dancing with him last night, out on the town, I still loved you. And like you said, during everything, you still loved me. And I’d like to think that we’re both being pretty honest about that. Yeah, there’s a chance, a certain and very clear possibility that we’ll go back on everything we’ve said tonight, and make all the same mistakes again. But I don’t want to think about it. I can’t, Alan. I can’t think of myself in the future as the tired, cheating wife I am. And I don’t want to think of you as a lying bastard of a husband. And you bringing up, talking about that chance that everything can go wrong, that’s good. That shows me that you can think of this without being selfish and angry. That you can feel guilt about it. I like that you can reflect on the wrong things we’ve done and know that they’re wrong. Shit, Alan, we’re old enough to know what we’ve done wrong.”

Alan smiled at this. I was looking inside now, at what I’d done. His points were just as valid for me. Could I do as he did? Could I actually contemplate the wrong things that I have yet to do? Could I trust myself to do the right thing? Out loud, I uttered, “That’s the problem, isn’t it?”

“What is?” He asked. “We don’t really trust ourselves, do we?” “What do you mean?” “Like, what you were saying about the chance. That chance depends on what we do about it, doesn’t it?” “Yeah, I guess. If say, I were to cheat on you in the future, I’d certainly have to have a conscious part in it, wouldn’t I?”

“You would. And I would, too. So, it comes down to trust. Alan, do you trust yourself enough to stay true to me?”

“I don’t know.” “Neither do I.” “That’s a good point.” “I know.” I found it amazing to have never thought of this.

“We’re not much good to each other if we can’t trust ourselves, are we?” He said with a sarcastic laugh, that kind you make when the doctor tells you that there’s something terribly wrong with you and there’s nothing you can do about it.

“So what about moving on?” I asked, with the same ferocity he used an hour ago.

“I think,” he said slowly, deliberately, “That I don’t very much like who we are.”

“So what do you suggest?” It seemed obvious, but I thought I better let him have it.

“There’s always becoming new people.” What a silly person, that Alan. “There’s always that, yes.” “We could do it.”

“You think?”

“Sure, why not?”

Crazy little Alan. Alan with his get rich quick schemes, only they were for rekindling love. I’d been here before.

“I thought you subscribed to the ‘people never change’ school of thought?”

“Well, people change, sometimes.” They don’t, but it’s nice of him to mention the possibility every now and then.

“You’re cute.” I had to let him know sometimes, even if all it did was re-assure that he was clever. He grinned that Cheshire cat grin, like a first grader who got the tough math question nobody else could quite figure out. Yes, Alan, You’re right, eight minus six equals two. Here’s a sticker. I put the wheels in motion, if only to let him have a brainstorm or two. I wanted to figure this out, I did, but I just didn’t have it in me to lead this charade of a game.

“So we should throw away everything about ourselves that we don’t like and start over?”

“Something like that,” he started, “I don’t suppose we should throw away everything we like about ourselves.”

“Not much point to that, is there?”

“Well, wait. Do we mean, throw away everything we don’t like about ourselves, or throw away what I don’t like about you, and vice versa.”

“That could become ugly.” “How do you mean?” “If I pointed out everything that I hated about you, and you did the same, we’d probably end up fighting again.”

“Maybe not.”

“Alan, we wouldn’t get through six items without having to throw things at one another.”

“So what do you suggest?”

“We could become completely new people. I mean, we stay away from each other for a while, say, six months, no, a year. Yeah, a year is enough time. And in that year, we completely change who we are. Philosophies, fashion, friends, how we look at the world, how we view art, how we eat. Can one change how they eat? I guess with enough determination, why not? How we live, I’ll have to move. Since I haven’t seen your place yet, you can stay where you are, or move if you like, whatever. We’ll have to start reading different newspapers, hell, get different jobs. I can quit at the office and get a freelance writing job, maybe for the local scene weekly or something. I’ll write the advice column, you know, about all sorts of gossip. Hell, that way, our problems won’t seem so bad!”

I threw back my head and laughed at the thought, of me sitting at my computer, attempting to solve other people’s severely complicated issues. Dear Julia, I know you must get this question all the time, but… it was too much to hold in. Alan wasn’t laughing, but enjoying what I was saying. Maybe he was considering it, who knows. He’s got those eyes to him. You never quite know what’s behind them. “And then,” I continued, “after a year or so of intense changes to every part of us, we’ll agree to meet somewhere. Lets say, some bar where we’ve never gone before but always wanted to. You know, neutral territory, like a first date. Everybody’s got a bar like that. It’ll be some hole in the wall pub with British or Irish artwork and design, and the bartender, he’ll try to pick me up, but I’ll say ‘sorry, I’m waiting for someone.’ and he’ll say ‘yeah, that’s what they all say,’ and then you’ll come in and sit down at the far end of the bar, because you won’t recognize me at first. I’ll have dyed my hair red, or gone back to the natural Auburn, you know, very advice column-ish, and I’ll have lost twenty pounds and wear an evening dress you’ve never seen before, something new I’d imagine, something daring.

“You, you’ll be in some winter sweater, something your mother will have bought you. You know, the ones you hate now? Well, you’ll love them. You’ll have grown a deep appreciation for your mothers careful knitting. I don’t know, maybe you’ll be knitting yourself by that point. After a few minutes, you begin introducing yourself to all the ladies’ at the bar, having them turn around and look you in the eye, and then you’ll wave them off, apologizing. ‘Sorry, I’m looking for someone else,’ you’ll say. It’ll break their hearts, really, because you’ll have been at the gym every other day for a straight year, and eaten impeccably well, and will look like you’re out of a Hollywood romance. After you ask them all, you find me, and I say something like “Have I met you somewhere before?” And I’ll say it with that little wasp that all the girls on MTV use, and you’ll fall desperately in love with me on the spot.”

Around here, I sat up and crossed my legs. I was hit with a good amount of inspiration, though who knows from what. Maybe I had been thinking about something like this. There was no way I was thinking all this myself. It had to be from a novel maybe, long ago, from those cheesy paperbacks I used to read. It sounded like something from those. Alan was extremely attentive at all of this. I could see it all over his face. He was as surprised as I was that so much could come out of me at once.

“We’ll chat over drinks, the new kinds we’ve grown to appreciate, and you’ll tell me about your new job, teaching art to high school kids, or maybe you’ll have written the great Canadian novel, and it’ll be full of every wonderful idea you’ve ever had. Everything will be character driven, of course, because you’ll have found a deep love for how a simple premise like two people talking on a bed—in the early morning after a night of deep, emotional arguments—can be as compelling a story as any of the incredible epics out there. You’ll have a scarf, a blue one, because right now you hate the colour blue and will, a few months from now, decide you need to do something about that. And you’ll have been single all year, just like me, a state neither of us have been in since early grade school. You had your first girlfriend at 13, didn’t you? Well, I was 15, his name was Randy, but you get the point. The time will have been very good and productive for both of us, and we’ll have become close with people we had no idea existed before, and we would talk about them and tell each other of just about every moment we’ve had since separating. The bartender will have to kick us out at two, and we’ll be shocked that the time has gone so quickly.”

Alan had sat up to, and in the same cross-legged way so we were matching and our knees almost touched. This was the first time in the last twelve hours that we were this close for more than a few seconds. I felt comfortable, here, on my bed with him. He was watching all of me, his eyes wandered everywhere but mostly they were on mine. This conversation reminded me so much of those first few weeks I knew him, when we planned our future, late at night in his dorm room, laying together in his bed, our hands reaching to the ceiling whenever we had a particularly huge idea.

“It sounds like a good time, doesn’t it?” I asked, feeling as though this were the point in the conversation where it became do or die. There would be no middle-ground between Alan and I. We had both, inside us, decided that either we were to be in love for the rest of our lives, or to never see each other after this very morning. The moves you make can be magical.

“I’ve got a song in my head, too,” Alan said, looking toward the window.

“Alan, it can wait.”

“Well, no, because now we both have the same problem. All we need is love is still swimming around up there, isn’t it?”

“Actually, I pretty much had it gone, but now that you mention it again, it’s back. Thanks a fucking lot, Alan.”

“So we’ve got the same thing to deal with.” “We have more than the songs in our head to deal with, Alan.”

“You cut us off right in the middle of our I love you’s to complain about yours, I can cut us off about our perfect imaginary future.”

“It doesn’t have to be imaginary…” “But it is, Julia. We couldn’t spend a year without each other.”

“I’ve been right close to never seeing you again thirty times tonight, Alan. A year won’t kill me.”

“We’ll get back to that in a second. Lets get these songs out. It’s driving me nuts.”

“You think it’s stupid, don’t you? That’s why you’re changing the subject.”

“That’s why you changed the subject with the I love you’s. You realized it was pointless.”

“Yes,” I caught myself, “No. I didn’t realize anything. And you’re admitting it. You think my idea of our little future together is silly.”

“Jules,” he took my left hand with his right, “I just think it would take more than just an idea. Something like that, a life changing thing, that’s a commitment.”

“You were the one who brought it up!” I pulled my hand away, and waved it in the air. We were, as he put it earlier, going in circles. “I was just going with it. You suggested we start new lives.”

“I know, I just didn’t think you would think up a probable scenario for it right away.”

“What’s the song then?” “What’s that?” “The song, the fucking song! You stopped my big idea of our future because you had a song in your head. What is it?” He said, rather sheepishly, “Jumping Jack Flash.” “Jumping Jack Flash?!? What in the hell does Jumping Jack Flash have to do with what we’re talking about?” “Why does it have to do with what we’re talking about?” “Mine did!” It did too. It popped into my head for specific reasons completely relating to what we were talking about. Future’s and all. We didn’t need new lives, or old ones, or old broken promises promised again. All we needed was as much God damn love we had. Didn’t he see that?

“Well, I’m not you, am I? Just because your song has something to do with this problem of ours doesn’t mean that mine has to.”

“The only reason I mentioned the song in the first place was because it had something to do with our problem. A hundred songs have been stuck in my head, Alan, but I mentioned that one because it meant something. Jumping Jack Flash doesn’t mean anything, not to us anyway.”

I stopped, and realized that we were arguing again. I had vigor to me, a little fight, something I thought was gone from me. It was a new day! We had left the space of being too tired to say anything, and caught that second wind that happens when you realize that yes, there will be no sleep until we collapse in defeat to nature’s will. This is what we needed. This was what we would use to get through. We would win! We would be triumphant! If only I didn’t completely hate him!

If Alan were to say something like “I don’t get you” or “Well, why is that a problem?” or “I’m allowed to bring up meaningless songs up whenever I damn well want!” I would have taken my newly realized strength and shot him through the window, and watched him fall twenty floors into the noisy, crowded outside world that would continue to move without me.

Instead, Alan said something that forced me to look at him as the man I fell in love with years before. He said, “I’m sorry. I love you. I don’t know what I was talking about. Julia, I can’t take this. I need to know if we’re going to be okay. I don’t want to talk about our future or how we’re going to change and be honest with each other and lead brand new exciting lives unless I know if it’s possible. You know my answer already. You know that I’ll do everything I can to make it work. I’m really determined to. But I don’t know about you. I don’t know what to think. I can’t read you. I need to know what you think.”

His confession was more than he hoped. Before his apology, before the words came out of his mouth, I still didn’t know what I was going to do. There was an equal shot of me leaving him and moving to Italy or Paraguay, never to see this man I’d spent the longest relationship of my life in as there was letting him move back in with me, with his big black suitcases and dresser, sitting out on the balcony, watching the stars, thinking up baby names. I could have gone either way. I was out, before his confession, out for my happiness whatever the cost. I could marry Mark or never see him again. I could begin a new life. I could write an advice column. I could get all new drapes. Whatever. Nothing mattered but the safety of my happiness.

But here it was. Sitting not a foot away from me was the chance at my happiness. I couldn’t quite do it without him. I loved this man more than the possibility of a new exotic life. I would take him, be with him and be happy. I decided, right this moment, that was what I would do. I had fought all night with this man. We argued over every moment we ever shared, the good, the bad, and the inconceivable. There would be a happy ending here. There must. It could end no other way. We would not fight this hard and this long for anything less. There would be victory at last! It would be great! It would be true!

I grabbed him by the shoulders, looked at him with the most determined look I could gather, and kissed him with thunder. A strong wind threw the window open and the world entered. The noise, the voices, the music, all invaded this exhausted battlefield in which we had waged war. But we did not stop. The elephants could not stop us. The mountains and the storms and the oceans could not stop us. The chances, the possibilities, the insecurity could not stop us. It could only get in our way, slow us down, make us fight harder, stronger, faster. There would be happiness in this house, in our home. It would be real. Our wedding bands and our friends and our lives meant less than this, this! Look what we are a part of!