34. Priya
PRIYA
Marcus finds me at Lavender House on Saturday morning.
I did not tell him I would be here. Marcus does not require telling.
Marcus operates on a frequency that detects emotional disturbance like a seismograph detects tremors, and the tremor I am producing this morning is apparently registering from across campus.
He sits down. He does not open the laptop. He does not consult the chart. This is how I know it is serious. Marcus without the chart is Marcus at his most human, the framework set aside in favor of the friend.
“Tell me,” he says.
I tell him. The omission. The funding crisis she carried alone.
The conversation that ended without resolution.
The leaving that was sadness, not anger.
The four days since, during which we have not spoken, the mutual freeze of two people who have hurt each other without meaning to and who do not yet know what the repair looks like.
Marcus listens. He listens completely, without interruption. When I finish he is quiet for a long moment.
“Do you want to be right or do you want her?” he asks.
“Those aren’t—”
“Those are different questions, Priya. Being right means she did what you said she did and you were justified in leaving. Wanting her means she did what you said she did and you choose to stay anyway, not because what she did was okay. Because who she is—the whole person, including the parts that manage alone—is who you want.”
I drink my coffee. The Calloway. Perfect, as always.
“I want her to let me in,” I say.
“She has let you in. She let you in further than she’s let anyone in twelve years. The question is whether you can be patient with the parts that are slower.”
“I have been patient.”
“You have been extraordinarily patient. And patience is not the same as acceptance. Patience waits for the other person to change. Acceptance loves the person who is here while the changing happens.” He pauses.
“Or doesn’t happen. Because she might not change this part.
This might be who she is—someone who manages alone when she’s afraid.
And you have to decide whether you can love that person, not the revised version of that person you’re hoping for. ”
The sentence sits between us. The sentence is the hardest thing Marcus has ever said to me and the truest. I have been loving the revision, the Margot who opens the window, who roars, who says more on a Saturday night, who moves her desk closer.
I have been loving the becoming. Have I been loving the person who is still, underneath the becoming, the woman who built a wall on a quad twelve years ago and who builds it again every time the fear is louder than the love?
Yes. The answer is yes. But that doesn’t make the wall acceptable.
The conversation about the wall still needs to happen, and the happening will be hard.
But the answer is yes because I have been inside the walls and I have seen what it was built to survive, and the woman who built it is the same woman who tore it down on a kitchen floor while I held her, and I cannot separate the builder from the one who tears down. She is the same person.
“I want her,” I say. “All of her. Including the parts that don’t know how to need me yet.”
Marcus nods. He opens the laptop. He looks at the chart. Whatever he sees there confirms what he already knew, because Marcus’s chart always confirms what Marcus already knows, and I am, today, grateful for it.
“Good,” he says. “Now go wait for her to figure it out. She will. The chart is very clear about this.”
I leave Lavender House. I walk home. The March wind is on my face. The crocuses are up along the campus path—purple, white, the first color after months of grey. The light is lasting longer. The spring is coming whether anyone is ready for it or not.
I go home. I wait.
I have never been good at waiting. But this—waiting for Margot, waiting for the walls to come down, waiting for the woman I love to choose the open window—this waiting I can do. Because the waiting is not empty. The waiting is full of her.