He wondered what she would do without him. They had become connected. Sometimes, she would be angry with him for things he had done that were secrets. She missed him minutes after they left each other and it hurt her physically when she was alone at night. She turned him into a slave and took forbidden pictures of him. In selfies, their eyes would glow together. They bought gifts for each other and cried when the other didn’t want to spend time together, even if it was just a few hours.
She liked his beard, because it made her feel more secure, as if he were an archetype in her heart. He liked the way she ate, stuffing food into her face with her fingers. She hated that he thought she snored. He always knew she was hungry because she would get grumpy without knowing why, and so he always had a stack of snacks ready for her to keep the peace.
But they’d been fighting a lot. He hadn’t told her he loved her. She knew how stubborn he was, but it wasn’t the real reason he was holding back from what was obvious. He couldn’t say it to her because they were doomed. Often she would text him at the exact moment despair caught him, like she knew what he was feeling from afar. In these situations, it was up to him to fight. He refused to lose. He got angry. Then he got tactical.
He’d been meditating and believed thoughts and emotions were just noise. She, meanwhile, was a storm of bright passion, flashing among the clouds. He saw himself as a hero, standing on a rock beneath that storm, calling for her lightning to hit his heart and be absorbed, for the electricity to be used as a generator. Every time she struck him, it was out of love.
So, the fool that he was, he joked and teased and apologized and obfuscated and played for time. Nothing was fated, people made their own fates, and if you survived this challenge and never gave up and then the next one, you never lost. And even if you failed, you learned. The only time you were defeated was if you accepted it was over. So he rowed on against the rising tide, against the rising waves, against fear and against the future. She watched him row and with each stroke he broke her heart.
She said they were so different, irreparably different, so different they may as well be from other planets. He was liberal, artistic, with a hunger for the free and the beautiful. He didn’t believe in rules, at least not those from a higher power. She loved her God and her truth, she loved her family and the respect she bore them. There was beauty for her in the small things, in children, in regulation, in the stories of her ancestors, in the journey of the faithful. She loved the way he lingered on small details, his wide ranging mind, but she looked through the window of their marriage and saw him frustrated, sullen, argumentative and blasphemous. He would never conform. He would never convert. He was not one of her people.
And so one day her parents decided to marry her off to another man. This gave her the leverage to end their relationship. It was neat, it was clean, it was nobody’s fault. They could both leave with their heads held high, because nobody gave up. Nobody did anything wrong. Nobody didn’t love the other one enough. It was the natural culmination. She knew it was now or never.
Half an hour before she was to meet her new suitor, she tried to break him. She let her emotions fly and swamped his little boat. She flipped him over, but still he clambered back on board. She drove into him hard with all her pain and despair. But no matter what she said, he would not let go of his tiny mast, with its tiny flag flying high in the wind. He knew what she was saying was true but he didn’t care. He knew he would hurt her and he didn’t care. He was selfish. He was in love.
Then came the silence, the long unbearable silence after the storm as he sat, dripping and cold in the night. His resolve was unmoved. He felt like nothing she could say could stop him. And then in a flash of lightning she shattered his puny little boat in half. “I’m not yours.” She told him. “Don’t tell me to stop it, I’m not yours anymore.”
He sank down into the waves. Would this be the end, he thought? Can I accept it?
Deep deep down in the ocean, the long tentacles of despair reached up and gripped his heart. How much longer would the generator last, he wondered, if she never struck him again?
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