23. Adriana
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Adriana
The room is small.
Nine feet by eleven, if you’re being generous. A single bed pushed against the wall. A desk that wobbles unless you shove a folded napkin under one leg. A window that looks out onto a fire escape and, if you crane your neck, a sliver of sky between buildings.
It’s mine.
I’ve been here two months now. Two months of instant noodles and library coffee and classes that make my brain hurt in the best way.
Two months of learning how to pay bills and do laundry and cook something that isn’t toast. Two months of being nobody’s daughter, nobody’s wife, nobody’s anything except a girl in a small room trying to figure out who she is.
I miss him.
That’s the thing I didn’t expect, that the missing wouldn’t fade.
I thought it would be like a bruise, painful at first and then gone.
Instead it’s just there, this low hum underneath everything, like background music I can’t turn off.
I’ll be fine for hours, focused on class or cooking or whatever, and then I’ll see something, a guy in a dark coat, a particular way the light hits a window, and my chest does this stupid thing. This Enzo thing.
But I don’t go back. Not yet.
Turns out I’m someone who likes morning runs.
Who knew. I spent twenty-four years thinking exercise was something other people did, but there’s a park three blocks from here, and one morning I just went.
Now I go every day. Six a.m., before the city wakes up, just me and the pavement and the sound of my own breathing.
I make friends slowly, it turns out, but I keep them. Lucia and I have dinner together twice a week, rotating who cooks. She’s teaching me to make her grandmother’s rice and beans. I’m teaching her that you can burn water if you really commit to it.
And apparently I cry at movies now. Never used to. Spent my whole life keeping everything locked down tight. Last week Lucia put on some rom-com and I sobbed through the entire third act. She handed me tissues and didn’t say a word.
The piano came back too. There’s one in the student center, old and slightly out of tune. I go there when it’s empty and play for hours. Not performing. Not practicing. Just playing because I want to.
Sometimes I play the piece I played for Enzo that night, the one where I cried. I don’t cry anymore when I play it. I just feel him there. In the notes.
I’m okay.
Not the fake okay I used to perform. Real okay. Okay that doesn’t need anyone else to sign off on it, that’s just mine.
But okay isn’t the same as not lonely. I figure that out somewhere around week three.
It’s late, Lucia’s out, the building’s gone quiet, and I’ve finished everything I needed to do.
I’m just sitting on my bed with nowhere to be and no one to be it with.
The room is small. It’s mine, and I love it. It’s also, some nights, very empty.
I’m not lonely the way I was afraid I’d be.
I thought living alone would feel like the worst parts of my old life, that hollow, unwanted feeling, like being a ghost in a house full of people who’d rather I wasn’t there.
It isn’t that. This lonely is cleaner than that.
I have friends I could call. I have a phone full of numbers and a life that’s actually mine. I’m not alone because nobody wants me.
I’m alone because the one person I want isn’t here.
That’s the part I can’t fix with a morning run or a good grade or a night out with Lucia.
There’s a him-shaped space in every room I’m in, and I’ve tried filling it with all the things I built for myself, and the things are good, the things are real, but they don’t fit that shape. Nothing does. Only him.
And the worst nights, I let myself sit in it instead of running from it, because I think that’s the test. Whether I can be alone and miss him and still not go running back before I’m ready.
Whether the missing is the sort that fades because I just needed somebody, anybody, or the sort that holds because it’s him.
It doesn’t fade. Two months, and it never once fades.
I still talk to him.
Not every day. That felt too close to what I was trying to leave behind. But a few times a week, we text. Sometimes we call.
He tells me about work, about the pigeon that’s decided his balcony railing is home now and won’t be talked out of it. I tell him about classes, about Lucia’s cooking experiments, about the professor who looks exactly like a turtle.
Normal stuff. Small boring details.
It’s nice. It’s also hard.
A few nights ago he called late, his voice tired, and I lay in my tiny bed with the phone pressed to my ear and I didn’t want to hang up. We talked for two hours about nothing. At the end he said, “I miss you,” quiet, like he wasn’t sure he was allowed.
“I miss you too,” I said.
And I meant it. I miss him all the time.
But I still don’t go back. Not yet.
***
The thing that changes everything is Lucia’s story.
We’re on her bed, takeout containers between us, some reality show playing in the background that neither of us is really watching.
She’s been venting about her ex for twenty minutes, this guy Derek who she dated for two years, who she thought was the love of her life, who turned out to be sleeping with his coworker the entire time.
“The worst part,” she says, stabbing a piece of orange chicken, “wasn’t even the cheating.
I mean, that sucked. But the worst part was how he acted after.
Like I was being unreasonable for being upset.
Like I should just get over it. He kept saying he loved me, but every time I’d bring up something that hurt me, he’d make it about him.
About how hard it was for him. How much he was struggling. ”
“That’s awful.”
“Right? And I kept forgiving him. Over and over. Because I thought that’s what love was. You know? Putting up with someone’s crap because you loved them. Making yourself smaller so they didn’t have to change.”
I nod slowly. I know exactly what she means.
“But then I met Jamie,” she says. Her face changes when she says his name, goes soft in a way I’ve never seen.
Jamie is her current boyfriend, the one she’s been seeing for six months, the one who shows up with her favorite coffee and remembers the names of all her cousins.
“And the first time I told him something he did bothered me, you know what he did?”
“What?”
“He apologized. Like, actually apologized. And then he didn’t do it again.
” She laughs, shaking her head. “That was it. No drama. No making me feel crazy. Just ‘I’m sorry, I won’t do that.
’ And I remember thinking, oh. Oh. This is what it’s supposed to feel like.
This is what it looks like when someone actually loves you instead of just saying it. ”
Something shifts in my chest.
“The difference,” Lucia says, pointing her chopsticks at me, “is that Derek loved the idea of me. The girlfriend who made him look good, who put up with his crap, who was always there. Jamie loves me. The actual person. Even the parts that are inconvenient.”
She goes back to her food, the conversation already moving on to something else.
But I’m not listening anymore. I’m thinking about Enzo.
About the night I told him he was controlling, and how he didn’t make excuses, didn’t make it about him, just said you’re right and started trying to change.
About the way he stood at my shoulder when my father came, not in front of me.
About him carrying my bags to the car, letting me go, even though I could see in his face how much it cost him.
Not because he wanted to. Because I needed him to.
And I’m thinking about all the men in my life who ever said they loved me. My father, who used love as a leash. Rafael, who didn’t even bother to pretend. And then Enzo, who loved me enough to release me.
“Hey.” Lucia waves a hand in front of my face. “Where’d you go?”
“Sorry. Just thinking.”
“About your guy?”
I haven’t told her much about Enzo. Just that there’s someone. That it’s complicated. That I needed space to figure things out.
“Yeah,” I say. “About my guy.”
“You get this face when you think about him,” she says. “This soft, dopey face. It’s disgusting.”
“Shut up.”
“I’m just saying. Whatever you’re figuring out, I think you already figured it out. You’re just scared to admit it.”
I throw a fortune cookie at her. She catches it, laughing.
But she’s right. She’s absolutely right.
***
That night I can’t sleep.
I lie in my tiny bed, staring at the ceiling, running through everything in my head.
Derek loved the idea of Lucia. Jamie loves the actual person.
Rafael loved the idea of a wife. A role I could fill. He never saw me at all.
And Enzo saw me. From the beginning. Before I even saw myself.
He saw me at those parties, years ago, when I thought I was invisible. He watched me walk down that aisle, terrified, and wanted to take me out of it. And when I turned up broken in his lobby, he didn’t try to fix me, just gave me the space to fix myself.
And when I told him I needed to leave, he let me go. Not because he didn’t love me. Because he did. Because he understood that real love isn’t about holding on. It’s about letting the other person become who they need to be, even if it means losing them.
My father would never let my mother go. He held her so tight she forgot she was a person.
Rafael held me so loosely I might as well not have existed.
And somewhere between those two extremes, Enzo figured out the thing neither of them ever could.
That love isn’t about grip. It’s about choice.
Choosing someone, over and over, and letting them choose you back.
I sit up in bed. My heart is pounding.
I love him.
Not because he saved me. Not because he was there when I was drowning. I love him because of who he is. Because of who I am when I’m with him. Because he makes me feel seen in a way no one else ever has, and he doesn’t ask me to be smaller to make that work.
I love him, and I’m not scared of it anymore.
And then, because I’ve apparently turned into a completely different person in two months, I get giddy about it.
There’s no other word for what happens. I’m sitting on the edge of my bed grinning like an idiot, my whole body gone fizzy, and I actually have to press my hands over my mouth to keep from laughing out loud at nothing.
Then the spiraling starts. Should I text him?
No. You do not text a man this. Should I call him, hear his voice, work up to it?
But then what do I even say, hi, it’s me, turns out I love you, how’s your afternoon?
Should I just go? Show up at his door like something out of a movie?
That’s insane. Or is it romantic? Is there even a difference?
Is it too soon, is it too much, am I going to get over there and lose my nerve and stand in his lobby like I did the first night, except this time with nobody to push me out the door?
I look at the clock. It’s the middle of a perfectly ordinary afternoon, a nothing day, nowhere I have to be. There is no reason in the world to go right now, no plan, no grand speech, nothing but the want of it.
Screw it.
I’m going now.
***
I call Amelia while I’m yanking a dress off its hanger.
“I’m going back,” I say.
She doesn’t ask where.
“About damn time,” she says. “I was starting to think I’d have to drag you there myself.”
“I had to be sure.”
“And you’re sure now?”
I look around my room while I’m pulling the dress on, phone wedged against my shoulder.
The bed I made, the books on the wobbly desk, the window with its sliver of sky.
I built this. I kept it. I proved I could stand on my own.
And I’m not giving it up by going to him. That’s the part I finally understand.
“I’m sure,” I say. “I’m already getting dressed.”
“Then why are you still talking to me? Go.”
“I wanted to tell you first.”
“Noted. Appreciated. Now hang up and go get your man.”
I’m not packing a bag. No just-in-case, no overthinking what it means. I put on the dress because I like how I look in it, not for him, and I grab my keys, and I go.
Lucia catches me at the door.
“You’re going somewhere,” she says, taking in the dress, the face I’m apparently making.
“I’m going to go tell someone I love him.”
She doesn’t even blink. “Coming back tonight?”
I think about it for half a second. The room. The life I built.
“Maybe,” I say. “Maybe not. I’ll text you.”
She grins. “Get it, girl.”
I roll my eyes. But I’m smiling when I walk out.
***
The cab ride feels long. Or maybe I’m just impatient.
I watch the streets shift from student-scrappy to sleek. The buildings getting taller. His world, bleeding into mine.
Except it’s not his world and my world anymore. Just the world. Both of us in it.
The cab stops. I pay, step out, smooth my dress down with both hands.
Deep breath.
I’m not nervous. That’s the strange part. I spent so much of my life nervous, about my father, about Rafael, about whether I was enough. But standing here now, I just feel calm.
I know who I am. I know what I want.
Now I just have to tell him.