My Husband

by Maud Ventura

(I may be Phaedra, but she is not Oenone.)

if I could wake up tomorrow as a ten-year-old again, I would study to be an astrophysicist or an astronaut, learn Latin and Greek, become a fencing champion. And above all: no crushes in elementary school, no boyfriend as a teenager, no great love story before marriage. I wouldn’t waste a minute being in love.

This phrase describes the instant that precedes the encounter, just before the plummeting, when we summon love. Because you never meet the love of your life out of nowhere, as unexpected as it might seem.

The way we met was so wonderful that sometimes I feel like it’s the real story, and our relationship merely an endless footnote.

I change rooms for him. Because of him, I am always the last to leave the table. I turn off the lights, I follow him up the stairs, I move behind him, remaining in his shadow. My husband, on the other hand, is not influenced by my comings and goings. My gravitational force is never sufficiently powerful to make him deviate from his course.

I love and want to be loved with so much gravitas that it quickly becomes exhausting (for me, for the other person). It’s always an unhappy kind of love.

I have nothing left to fear, because what was bound to happen has happened. I have nothing left to fear, because the worst has happened.

If we could identify our last times as easily as our first times, thousands of moments would be lived more intensely.