“This is how I release myself from the burden of trying to love two people at once”, she decided.
Folding one item after the other without really paying attention, she saw all she had managed to do was make a pile of his clothes in her own box.
Focus. Focus. Focus.
Everything she had brushed aside, excused, and reasoned into being washed over her now with an awareness she always denied at first- it was easy to deny.
He made sure she was happy in terms of whatever she asked for. Always the attentive lover she never thought would be hers, not after all the frogs she had kissed. So she let his indifference to having children, his reluctance to take her to meet his family, all those things that made her feel like they were moving forward—she let them pass until he was ready. She gave herself the comfort of a ring without a proposal. The man he became when she asked for either of these things, she also forgave.
The way he would be silent for weeks, he started to think of his voice as a gift, what felt like a separation of souls when she couldn’t reach him. No matter the joke, the worry, no matter what she said—His eyes stayed dead until he forgave her with a gift and his cheerful self returning like it had never happened.
Curiosity made her an eager student. So she started to follow him—to a part of town she had never been to. She watched him receive kisses from children that would never be hers, and something else from a woman who wasn’t her.
That something was why she was packing her things.
The woman didn’t look at him the way she did, with adoration or reverence. She looked at him like she knew him, like they had lived many lives together—long before she ever came around.
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