53 Letters for My Lover (53 Letters for My Lover, #1)

by Leylah Attar

Troy, meet Hafez, Shayda’s husband. Her anchor, her rock, her safe harbor. Hafez, meet Troy, the current that sweeps her so far ashore, she forgets which way is home. They shake hands—the solid, down-to-earth man and the restless, unpredictable lightning in the sky. I feel like a tree exposed to the elements, my roots clinging to the soil, my branches flirting with heaven.

How do you deny a living, breathing feeling? How do you hack it and kill it and bury it so that it never surfaces again?

I do my best, leaving out the husks, the tough, tasteless bits that stick in your mouth, begging to be spit out. Like lying under bright surgical lights, feeling like a still-alive frog about to be dissected. The phantom pains that fool you into thinking you still have your breasts, until you reach for them. Wishing you could keep the thick, white gauze on forever so you don’t have to face the deformity below. Crying in the bathroom because your scars are puckered and bruised, and not at all like the nice, clean lines you imagined. How ‘okay’ becomes your personal mantra. ‘Okay, okay, okay,’ while you’re waiting for them to tell you if they got it all. ‘Okay, okay, okay,’ when you notice skin folds on the side of your body because the tissue under your arms is now just hanging. ‘Okay, okay, okay,’ when your backside is gaping through thin, paper gowns and you would give anything for a blanket.

“If we base our decisions on all the things we’re afraid of, we would be paralyzed with fear. We’d never have the guts to love, or hope or dream, or have kids, or swim in the ocean. And that’s what makes us human, isn’t it? What carries us through it all?”

There is nothing to hide anymore. When love looks at you, when it truly pins you down and stares into your soul, it renders you defenseless. And in that moment, in that state of humbling nakedness, it makes you completely invincible.

“The only way to feel truly alive is to start living fearlessly.”

We have an infinite capacity to love, but when you wrap up your love and give it to someone, they expect all of it. And that’s what you think too—that you’re giving them everything you’ve got. You really do. Until you realize that love is end-less, bottom-less, boundary-less. The more you give, the more gushes out. It spills over, refusing to be contained in neat little parcels, swelling like a river after a flash flood. And in the end, it doesn’t matter which part was whose, because in the end it’s all one, like streams merging into the ocean.