30. Maya
Maya
"The Breaking Open"
I take a cab home because I don't trust myself to drive with this much feeling in me. I sit in the back seat and watch the city go by and I am undone in the specific way of someone who has been holding something very carefully for a long time and has just watched it very nearly slip.
The wedding. The dance. The forehead on his cheek — that was mine, I did that, I moved toward him without thinking and he held me without asking and it was sixteen seconds and I felt the full terrible weight of how much I had missed that, specifically, the simple animal reality of being held by someone who knows you.
And then I stepped away. And I was right to step away. And the rightness of it was the worst part.
I get home at 12:30. I take off the green dress and hang it up and sit on the edge of my bed in the dark for a few minutes. Then I pick up my phone and call my mother.
She answers on the third ring, slightly groggy but present. "Maya. What time is it?"
"Late. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have —"
"No, I'm awake. What happened? Are you okay?"
"I'm okay. I'm — I was at Priya's wedding and Daniel was there and we danced and I —" I stop. I breathe. "Mom, I want him back. I think I've known it for a while. But I'm so afraid that going back means becoming the version of me that he never saw."
"Oh, baby," she says.
"I don't know how to do both. I don't know how to be me — the me I'm becoming, the one who works and has her own studio and takes up space — and also be his wife.
I don't know if those two things are compatible inside the same life.
And if they're not —" My voice gives a little.
"If they're not, then I love someone I can't go back to, and that's the rest of my life. "
She's quiet for a moment.
"What's he been doing?" she asks.
"He's in therapy. He came to my exhibition.
He built me a studio in the spare room. He's been to some hiking group.
He called me when something reminded him of me instead of waiting for an excuse.
He let me pull back last month without making it into something to fix.
" I breathe. "He stopped performing and just — started being.
And that's more frightening than if he'd stayed exactly who he was. "
"Why frightening?"
"Because if he stays exactly who he was, I know what I'm choosing between. But this? This is —" I press the back of my hand to my eyes. "What if I go back and I start to shrink again? What if I can't hold onto who I am now and also be his wife? What if love is the thing that erases me?"
She is quiet for so long that I think the call might have dropped.
Then she says: "That's the right question."
"I don't have the answer."
"Have you asked him?"
A beat.
"No," I say.
"Maya." Her voice is gentle and direct the way it always is when she's about to tell me something I need to hear.
"You've been asking yourself and asking me and asking the space above your apartment at midnight.
But the person you haven't asked is the person who has been writing you letters for four months.
" She pauses. "That's the conversation you need to have. "
I sit with it.
"I know," I say.
"Don't wait too long," she says. "Not because of him. Because of yourself."
We say goodnight. I lie in the dark for a long time after.
At some point I get up and go to my drafting corner and I open a sketchbook and I draw.
Not carefully. Fast, loose, the way you draw when you're trying to outrun your own thoughts.
I draw a woman in two rooms at once, somehow.
A woman standing at a threshold with one foot in each.
I draw it over and over until I understand what I'm looking at.
She's not choosing between the rooms.
She's trying to understand if one of them has been built strong enough for both.
End of Part Four