33. Maya
Maya
"The Decision Shapes Itself"
I make tea. Earl Grey, with a splash of milk, which is how I take it when I'm thinking. I make it in the mug my mother gave me, plain white, no slogan, just a good mug, the kind that feels right in your hands.
I sit on my couch, my small couch, in my apartment above the bookshop that smells faintly of the books below and the lavender from the fire escape and the particular smell of paper and pencil shavings that has become the smell of my daily life. I sit with my tea and I look at the walls.
There are seven of my drawings hung there now.
The woman at her grandmother's window. The hands with a pencil.
The woman in the doorway, deciding. Three pages from the illustrated series that the publisher has said yes to — small press, lovely editor, honest response to the work.
A sketch of the oak tree in my mother's backyard, done on a morning when I couldn't sleep.
I look at these drawings and I think about the woman who packed a bag in a dark house and drove through the night to her mother's.
I think about what she needed. I think about whether she recognizes herself in the woman sitting here now with Earl Grey and her own walls and her own work and her own decision to make.
She does. That woman is still here. She expanded, she didn't disappear. And that — that is the thing I needed to know.
Can I be fully myself and also love him?
Only if he keeps choosing me. And only if I keep choosing myself. Both things. Not one instead of the other. Not the way I used to do it — myself quietly diminishing while I chose him over and over. But both. Together. In the same life, with the same air, with equal claim on the space.
I think about the park. The way he said you're right to be afraid without flinching.
The way he named the structures — not the feelings, the structures.
I know Daniel. I know that he thinks in structures, in systems, in the things that hold.
And for the first time, he has applied that to me.
To us. To what we need rather than just to what works conveniently.
That is not nothing.
That is, in fact, everything.
I pick up my phone.
He picks up before the second ring.
"Can you come over?" I say.
A pause.
"Yes," he says. "When?"
"Now," I say. "If you can."