Silence is how you respond when she tells you, her lilting voice that always reminds you of the seaside at dawn now trembling with pain, that her boyfriend is cheating on her. Silence. Because the truth in that moment is too ugly to put on display and because it’s not a complete truth. Yes, some part of you is glad that it is over, that you now have a chance to finally make her see just how much you want to be with her. And yet, for now, you are just friends—liars and friends, denying the spark that has existed between you since you first met, since your first kiss, since you first looked into each other’s eyes and got hopelessly lost, two years ago and two continents away. Eventually, you remember how much she said she really liked him, and how badly she must be hurting in this moment. And because you love her, you finally gather enough sheaves of empathy to say, “I’m so sorry, B” and mean it. She is racked by another wave of sobs and you respond with another awkward . . .
Silence.
That is what follows after you tell her you love her seven months later, and ask her the question. You are both sitting on comfortable chairs in the brown wood and gunmetal embrace of the Oriental Hotel lounge with gin and tonics in your hands. It’s a few days to Christmas and enthusiastic red and green and yellow lights are blinking all around you like fireflies filtered through a rainbow. Your heart is beating wildly in your chest and the edges of your vision are becoming blurry. She is staring at your face intently—perhaps looking for some visual confirmation of what you just said or perhaps just because she cannot bear not to look at you in this moment. This moment you have chosen to cross a bridge you both knew existed but did not dare set foot upon for reasons neither of you can or ever will be able to accurately articulate. But now, in this seemingly infinite moment, everything is changing, initiated, as was all creation, by four simple words.
Do you love me?
But all you have created is tension. Something slithers slowly down your spine sending a shiver surging through you. You wonder if she notices. The silence is starting to burn your ears. You want to say something to fill it up, follow up your declaration of love with the perfect words to convince her of its validity, but you can barely breathe. It feels like you have been inflated with too much emotion. Then, just when you cannot endure it any more, she opens her mouth and finally breaks that horrible, excruciating . . .
Silence.
There have been four months of it for your sanity’s sake. Not because she said ‘No’; that would have been easy to deal with in comparison. But because she said ‘I don’t know,’ which was probably the truth of what she felt in the moment. But as anyone who has ever lied to someone they love before knows, sometimes the truth hurts more than any lie ever could.
So you’d asked for an explanation and you gotten one, but it didn’t make sense to you because you loved her and you were sure she loved you, and so nothing else but your dream of love could have possibly made sense. Somewhere in the slurry of teary words, she’d said she needed time. So you gave her that. So you gave her three weeks to make up her mind; three weeks of hardly eating and barely breathing and constantly waiting for her to say yes. But when the time came and she still said she didn’t know, that she was dealing with her own personal issues and needed time to work her way through, you did what you thought you had to do. You let your love ignite itself and turn into a bright, burning anger and because you couldn’t stand to see her with your soul still on fire. You cut her off, for your sanity’s sake. You built sturdy walls out of deleted phone numbers. You blocked social media accounts, shed tears, ignored emails, neglected text messages, drank copious amounts of alcohol, and avoided mutual friends. But it is the nature of walls to eventually fall, and your wall has all come crumbling down now that she is standing in front of you, her hair wet and matted to her skin from the rain, her chest heaving rhythmically, her make-up running along the edges of her face in localized ochre rivulets. Shocked, you say, “hi,” and she says, “I’ve missed you,” and then you take her in your arms and press her to your skin desperately, wondering how you ever shut her out and let her go, went all these months without talking to her, hearing her laugh, seeing her smile. Feverishly, you tell her you’ve missed her too, and then she pulls you close and kisses you deeply and when she pulls away all your walls are rubble around your feet and then there is an extended . . .
Silence.
It has become comfortable. She lays in your arms, her head snug in the crook between your neck and your shoulder. Silent and comfortable, this is how you now spend most of your time together—holding each other in silence. The explanations have been made: she needed time to be sure it wasn’t a rebound, that she wouldn’t use you to work through a recently failed relationship. You couldn’t bear to be around her or hear her name without having her to hold and cherish and love in all the ways one human being could love another. The mechanics of the separation were unfortunate but necessary. She is now sure. You are now whole. All is well. You adjust your arm and realize with an overwhelming, ineffable certainty that in that moment, under the fluorescent glow of the solitary light bulb in her apartment and a million more moments like it, you are both home, with nothing to say and everything to be.