Someday, Maybe

by Onyi Nwabineli

But grief torches your capacity for both sympathy and empathy. I am nothing but a selfish collection of exposed nerve endings.

I wasn’t ready for Q. He was not someone that was supposed to happen to me.

Now it is here and even a pill can’t dull the ache. Would he be proud? Undoubtedly. Is he still gone? Irrevocably.

I also think about how underneath the pain and the disbelief is that unmistakable hint of relief that this person I loved more than life will never get the opportunity to tire of me and find the someone better they deserved. Gone are the untold number of chances to disappoint. I always expected Q to leave me. I just didn’t know he would leave everyone else at the same time.

“Right. But you guys agree with her. Low-key, you think she’s right.” The brief silence that meets my statement is all the confirmation I need.

“But your life is never completely your own when you have people who love you. I think you know it.” With these words she reminds me that you never stop being a parent, not really, not when your grown, successful son confides in you about his daughter who has given up.

Everyone knows you’re supposed to go to pieces after your first love—first real love—ends. And

overachiever that I am, I excelled in the art of Falling Apart, and look at me now. Years later and still defending my title.

a mother-in-law whose hatred of me could replace fossil fuels as an energy source

It represents all the snide comments he pretended he couldn’t hear, the arguments he refused to have with her but instead had with me. It represents my own unwillingness to serve him an ultimatum, too frightened to confront the possibility that I would lose.

I was a girl too cowed by years of middling social success among her peers and too preoccupied with the threat of zero post-university job prospects to care too much about embracing my newfound independence.

“You’ll be happy again. He wasn’t the author of that. It’ll just be different.”