loved you. I did. I do. So much. But what you were asking wasn’t fair. And it hurt then—it still hurts now—that you’d made this decision to leave without my input and weren’t willing to think about any alternatives.
“That’s not what I meant,” you said.
I sighed. It was all too much. “Let’s talk about it in the morning,” I told you.
“But—” you started. Then you closed your mouth. “Okay,” you said. But you didn’t move. You stayed put, sitting on the bed. You kept your hand on mine.
“Gabe?” I asked.
You turned to face me. A police car sped by, its flashing lights reflected in your eyes. “I can’t sleep without you, Lucy.”
I felt my tears pool again. “That’s not fair,” I said. “You don’t get to say that. You have no right.”
“But it’s true,” you said. “That’s why you should come to Iraq.”
“Because you’re having trouble sleeping without me next to you in bed?” I pulled my hand out of yours.
“I didn’t mean it literally,” you said. “I meant I love you. I meant I’m sorry. I meant I want you to come with me.” You didn’t get it.
I sat up and turned on the bedside lamp. We both squinted in its harsh light. I saw the pain etched onto your face. You looked raw and vulnerable. Miserable. Lost. Like you did that night at Faces & Names, the night we reconnected. And there it was, my pomegranate seed, that part of you that still makes it so hard for me to turn away. When you show me that vulnerable piece of yourself, it makes me feel responsible. Because we only reveal our true selves to the people we care about most. I think that’s why our relationship jump-started so quickly. We had no barriers on September 11th—we revealed our secret selves to each other right away. And you can’t ever take that back. But that night it wasn’t enough. I needed more from you. I needed understanding and honesty and compromise. I needed commitment. It wasn’t even worth fighting anymore.
I reached for your hand. “I love you, too,” I said, “but I can’t come with you. You know that. Your dreams are there, but mine are here.”
“You were right before,” you said, your voice sounding strangled. “Let’s talk about it in the morning.”
I watched you pad across the apartment, fold your long body onto the couch. I turned out the light and thought of all the reasons it made no sense for me to go with you to Iraq—and the one reason it did: because I couldn’t imagine my life without you.
WHEN I WOKE UP BLEARY-EYED, with a pounding headache, you were sitting on the couch watching me.
“I know you can’t come,” you said quietly, the moment my eyes were open. “But I promise, we’ll stay in touch. I’ll see you when I come to visit the city. I’ll always love you.” Your voice caught in your throat. “But I need to do this. And the fact that I was ready to throw away your dream—I’m my father all over again, Lucy. I think . . . I think you’ll be better off without me.”
My head throbbed. My eyes burned. And I truly fell apart then; I couldn’t stop the sobs, the shaking, the sounds coming out of my mouth that seemed prehistoric. Expressions of pain coded into our DNA from our preverbal ancestors. You were really leaving. You were really leaving me. I had known this would happen, at some point, but I never let myself imagine what it would be like when it did. And it felt like a nightmare. Like my heart was made of blown glass and someone had thrown it to the floor, shattered it into a million pieces, and then ground their heels into the shards.
The fact that you invited me to go with you, it meant a lot. It always has. But it wasn’t a real offer, not a fully thought-out one. It was a middle-of-the-night apology, an attempt to fix your mistake in not telling me sooner, in keeping secrets, in leaving me out of the process. Though a part of me has always wondered what would’ve happened if I’d said yes. Would it have changed both of our lives completely, or would we still have ended up here, with me in this too-bright room, wishing I were anywhere else, and wishing at the same time that I never had to leave? I guess we’ll never know.
You packed up your stuff that week and left to spend time with your mom before you took off for good. And I sat in what used to be our apartment and cried.
WE NEVER TALKED ABOUT WHAT IT WAS LIKE AFTERWARD. I never told you how broken I was. How I looked at the spaces your books left on the bookshelves and couldn’t bring myself to fill them. How I couldn’t eat waffles without crying. Or wear the wooden bracelet you bought me at the street fair on Columbus Avenue—the one we stumbled upon and then stayed at all afternoon, eating mozzarepas and crepes and pretending that we needed a new carpet for our imaginary ski house.
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