Broken
Life always does what it wants
The next time, he would explain everything face-to-face; life would do what it wanted after that.
I repeated the sentence like a charm on my bracelet, while the bus hissed and lurched, and the city slid past in wet streaks. I had written it on my wrist in blue ink, crooked letters that bled into my skin. The promise steadied me. Promises do that, even when they are as thin as paper and just as easy to tear.
I was afraid of the space between now and then. Afraid of the call that wouldn’t come, the message that would arrive too late, the look on his face when I finally spoke. Fear had become a sound in my head, a low electrical hum that never shut off. It followed me into rooms. It slept beside me. It woke me with my heart hammering as if it had been chased all night. Night terrors.
I had loved him carefully at first. I remember that about myself with a strange pride. Curious. I had folded my feelings small and neat, tucked them into corners, told myself I could always unfold them later. Yes, later. When he laughed, I let it pass through me without grabbing. When he reached for my hand, I told myself it was temporary, that everything was. I was wrong about the order of things. Love comes first. Caution arrives late, dragging its bulging suitcase.
The night everything, every bloody thing, cracked, I stood in his kitchen, counting the magnets on the fridge because my hands needed something to do. I said a name I should not have said. The air changed. It felt like the moment before thunder. He went quiet in that way that isn’t calm at all. I could see the math of it moving behind his eyes, the subtraction that left nothing.
I tried to explain. I tried to gather words and line them up, but terror made them slippery. They fell apart in my mouth. He listened with his body turned slightly away, already preparing to leave. When the door shut, it made a sound like a sentence ending. Or a life at the end of a gun.
After that, time became unreliable. The days, those long days, stretched thin and tore. The nights, broken and silent, collapsed into one another. I walked too much, talking too much, to myself, taking routes that passed his building. I refused to admit that was why. Every shadow looked like him. Every phone vibration felt like a verdict.
I kept writing drafts of the truth. There were long ones, short ones, and ones that tried to be brave. I deleted them all, sighing with each stroke of that key. After all, written words felt like cowardice. I wanted him to see my face. I wanted him to see the way my hands shook, and the fear, that fear, I had no reason to hide anymore. Face-to-face felt honest. It felt like punishment and absolution at once.
On the bus, a woman across from me watched me watch the door. Her eyes were soft. Pity? I wondered, did she see a person rehearsing a future that might not happen? A person gripping a rail as if it were the last solid thing left?
My phone buzzed. No, not his name. It was a number I didn’t recognize. Fuck it. I let it ring. I was, after all, saving myself, was I not? No. I was saving the moment as the bus slowed. Rain smeared the windows until the world looked like it had been rubbed away.
I thought about the small things I would say when I saw him. Not the confession first. I would ask how his sister was. I would tell him I still had the mug with the owl and the chip on the rim. I would apologize without qualifying it. I would say I was afraid and mean it in the deepest way, not as a defense but as a fact. He could not fail to see.
The bus lurched again, harder this time. There was a sound like metal folding. Someone screamed. The floor rushed up to meet me, cold and sudden. For a moment, terror was a bright, clean thing, sharp enough to cut through everything else. Then it dulled and was gone.
When I woke, the city was quiet in a way it never is. No engines, no voices. The rain had stopped. I sat up and felt light, wrong, somehow. The bus was there, but also not. I could see it the way you see something remembered, edges soft, details missing.
My phone lay on the ground, screen lit. The missed call glowed like a bruise. His name.
I picked it up. My hand went through it, or it went through my hand. Either way, the truth settled in me with a terrible gentleness. The promise on my wrist had blurred, the ink washed pale. Face-to-face had been a hope, not a plan.
I don’t know how long I stood there, trying to breathe without lungs, trying to feel a heart that was no longer mine. Eventually, the quiet lifted. Sounds returned, distant and loud at once. People moved around me, through me. A man knelt where I had fallen. He covered my face with his jacket. He did it tenderly, as if I could feel it.
Later, when night came back the right way, I found myself where I had always been going. His building rose out of the dark, windows lit like constellations. I stood outside, unseen, and watched him pace his living room, phone in his hand, fear written plainly on his face.
I wanted to tell him everything. I wanted to tell him I was sorry and afraid and that I had loved him without knowing how to stop. I wanted to tell him the promise had been real, even if it arrived broken.
Life did what it wanted after that.
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