Page 52 of One of Those Amnesia Stories

I’d give her the ring.

I’d finally give her something so enormous, so unmistakable, that she would never again have to wonder whether I loved her.

At least, that was how I’d imagined it.

But when I arrived at her apartment that day, I barely made it through the door before she rushed toward me, her face flushed, her breathing uneven, her eyes shining with an excitement I hadn’t expected.

Then she blurted it out.

“Will you marry me?”

I didn’t even let her finish.

“Yes.”

The answer tore out of me so fast it almost sounded desperate. I caught her around the waist and pulled her against me, a disbelieving laugh breaking from my chest as I lifted her off the floor. She laughed too, startled and delighted, her arms winding around my shoulders as I kissed her again and again, unable to stop smiling.

For the first time in my life, I hadn’t needed to scramble for some grand way to wipe the disappointment from someone’s face. I hadn’t needed to earn my way back from the words I couldn’t say, or bury my silence beneath another achievement, another sacrifice, another extravagant gesture.

She had simply understood me.

I held her tighter, burying my face in her hair as I let myself sink into the feeling I had spent years chasing. Maybe I’d finally gotten it right. Maybe I had finally found a way to love someone without constantly worrying that I wasn’t giving them enough.

I convinced myself that she wouldn’t have asked me to marry her if she truly doubted what I felt. She wouldn’t have taken my hand and asked me to spend the rest of my life with her if my silence had left her questioning whether I loved her. She had to understand. She had to see all the things I had been trying to tell her without ever saying them.

My actions were my language.

And that day, I believed she had finally learned how to read me.

So I stopped being afraid of my silence.

I stopped wondering whether the things I did were enough. I stopped searching her face for signs that I’d disappointed her again. I thought we were fine.

I truly believed we were.

But then she asked me that question that night, and my entire world stopped.

“Do you love me?”

Four ordinary words.

Four words that struck with enough force to steal the air from my lungs.

I stared at her, unable to comprehend what I was hearing. My wife stood before me with tears gathering in her eyes, looking at me with a hurt I had put there, searching my face for an answer I should have given her long before she ever had to ask.

How had we reached this point?

How had I managed to make the woman I loved feel so unloved that she had to stand in front of me and ask?

I hated myself for it.

I hated that I had made the woman I loved question something that had always been so painfully true inside me. I hated that she had reached the point where she needed to ask because I had failed to make her feel the answer. Most of all, I hated that even then, with her heart breaking right in front of me, my body betrayed me the same way it always had.

I tried to speak. I tried to force the words up from somewhere deep inside me. I pushed my jaw open, dragged in a breath, fought against the panic squeezing my throat shut. My lips parted, but nothing came. I could feel the words trapped inside me, begging to be released, while my body betrayed me all over again.

She waited.

And I watched the hope in her eyes collapse beneath the weight of my silence.