Waiting

I waited.

It was becoming a chess game. It was not a strategic game, it was just that neither one of us wanted to call it quit.

I tried.

Trying to forget, to insert new people into it, to live without him, to sample a life without his existence, to not feel that gaping hole that was inside of me.

A world, without him.

It was not working.

So I waited.

Waited for my heart to return, to return to where it rightfully belonged.

"I want your body to be mine and mine only." He said.

"It is yours." I answered.

"But I want more. One more thing." He added.

"What is that?" I asked.

"Your heart. I want your heart." He replied.

"You want me to love you?" I asked you.

"Yes." No uncertainty.

"What about you?" I needed to know what I was getting into.

"You know how I feel." I could feel his breath. His face inches away from mine. His lips on my face. Moving from my lips to my cheek and back.

"Then tell me." I demanded.

"You know how I feel." He repeated.

"Do tell. Do you love me?" I wanted to hear it from him.

"I love you." There. It was not hard after all.

"I love you." I answered back.

I could only love one person, as it turned out. I could not divide and conquer, mix and match, pick and choose. I was biting more than I could chew.

"Two years, that’s twelve times as long as the first time." He had earlier stated a lesser known fact.

I was not into statistics, but I knew that we once dated. Some fifteen years ago, for about two months.

My heart had returned home. It traveled far. It was homeless for a while. It required not reassurance but faith in its journey, adventure, or misadventure, as the case maybe, to return home.

I was never unkind to him. I was simply unsure about him. About what he was like when he was not with me, about whether he loved me, and about a future, a future with him and him only. When I did not know, I resorted to write-offs. I was a trained CPA. I knew how to declare permanent loss. Write-offs, bad debt. I did not want him in my life because I was afraid of losing him, or worse yet, what if I never had him, what if he was simply playing with my heart and one day he got bored and walked away, and failed to inform me? What if he forgot to tell me that he had moved away, and no forwarding address was provided to the postal office?

I could not eat or sleep when I was with him. We often never made it out of his flat. In his bed, we were folded like dumplings, with our clothes scattered around from the living room and bedroom. My still wet hair tangled up like a bird’s nest. There he was thrusting himself into and out of me, and then resting beside me, telling me about his feeling towards me, like it was the latest news, and not a repeat of the last two years.

It took a long time for me to stop feeling like a fool. I thought he no longer wanted me. It was difficult to handle rejection, even an imaginary one.

My world was a better place with him in it. It shined brighter. I was more grounded, less antsy, and I was no longer missing anything. He completed me.

It was always more difficult to wait and see, than to draw half baked conclusion.

"What do you mean?" I asked him to clarify an earlier statement.

"I have been with you for two years. Many people would stop feeling as excited. I am more attracted to you as time goes on." He explained.

"But why?" I wanted to understand it.

"Because we belong together. We belong." He had told me that before. I did not believe him. It sounded so cliche. But this time it felt genuine. He meant it. Perhaps he always meant it. I just refused to believe him.

There was always that tipping point, when you just knew.

I used to feel anxious about him. I had loved no other. It was not a conscious decision, it was unplanned. It was an instinct. We were the Cinderella and the glass slippers. we were custom-designed for each other, we were declared factory rejects, tossed aside by mainstream, but we fit together perfectly, in a defective way.

"I love you." He would say to me over and over again.

"I love you." In the darkness I could only hear him and see the broad frame of him. With him, my kinks were unapologetically natural, with him, I could be myself.

In the darkness and quietest moment, a fast car zooming through the windiest road in San Francisco, a woman’s pounding the pavement with her heels, and an early morning jogger telling his running partner how he felt about a woman he was in love with.

Last night he said to me, “I am in love with a crazy girl.”

"Tragic. Utmost tragic. You met not a girl, but a woman in midlife crisis." I disputed his statement.

"But you are still hot. And you are always my girl." He draped his arms around me. I was feeling secure for once. I needed not to travel the world to find another person. I had finally found my perfect match in this imperfect world.

He made love to me, hurting me a little, the way I liked. I had not been physically intimate with anyone for a while. With him, only, and it was becoming difficult, I felt out of practice. But he tolerated me just the same.

"What is that you do in the winter?" He asked.

"I need wood. Lots of firewood. To heat up the house. Someone will deliver them for me." I knew what he meant.

A future, at last. A future with he and I only. A future where I could dare to imagine. A real winter with firewood and snow covered path. A foreign land with him and only him. I would put on his coat and scarf as he went out for the morning to fetch bread and cheese. He was older, beautiful and happy, because in that future no obstacle existed. I was content and filled with peace as I waved goodbye to him. In that future my world and his world no longer competed. Our worlds did not experience collusion or detour. We simply formed our own world.

6:30 AM. It was still dark.

"Early birds catch the worm. You can have all the worms in the world." I said.

I needed to sleep. I was never a morning person. At seven he was dressed and ready to go. I needed another thirty minutes, or an hour. So he told me how to exit the house, another door, another way. He gave me details.

"You go out of the bathroom door. Walk down the stairs. And by the trash cans you will find a small path leading to a door. You can exit onto the street. Make sure you lock everything when you leave."

He kissed me to say goodbye. I could barely open my eyes.

For the next half an hour I drifted into dreams. In one of the dreams, I was standing in a large building. A performance was going on. A friend came over to ask me why I was there alone, I told him that my partner had left for work, I was to find another way to get out of the building. My friend tossed me a curious look but said nothing. I felt well justified to say nothing at all.

For two years I did not know there was another way to get out of the house. Another door. Like some sort of magic trick. There was another way out.

Suppose that was how our relationship was going to last. We must find another door. A door that led to an alternate future. A door that led to a path that was windy and filled with pleasant surprises. A door that would lead to an exit, where he would be waiting for me. I would tell him that I had gone around the world twice looking for that door. He would be smiling and say to me, “You never had to travel that far. You needed only to stand still, and say ‘Open Sesame.'”

Suppose this was just a waiting game. I needed to wait for my heart to return. He needed to wait to be sure that I was his and his alone, at last.

Suppose this was a new beginning. Suppose life was never meant to be complicated. We were both waiting for each other. And now we were found.