Page 81 of One of Those Amnesia Stories

I wanted to refute her. Tell her she was wrong. I wanted to argue that she was the most important person in my life. The only important one.

But the words turned to ash before they could leave my mouth.

Because she was right.

I had spent so long telling myself that I was protecting her from the mess inside my head, but even that had been about me. My shame. My fear. My inability to admit that I was failing.

When I begged her to stay, I wasn’t thinking about what she needed. I was thinking about how unbearable it would be to lose her. Even my apologies had been selfish. I wanted forgiveness because I couldn’t stand the person I had become without it.

I had only been thinking about myself.

The evidence kept piling up until there was nowhere left to hide from it. I hadn’t told her the company was crumbling because I couldn’t bear to let her see how badly I was failing. I hadn’t given her my time because I was consumed by problems I had decided were more important. I hadn’t acknowledged how lonely she had been, even while she was right in front of me. I had forgotten her needs, dismissed her hurt, and then expected her to understand why.

And all that time, I had been feeding myself the same pretty little lie.

I’m protecting her.

This is for her.

She doesn’t need this stress.

What about the stress she carried when her husband stopped coming home?

What about the nights she lay awake with no idea where she stood with the man who was supposed to be beside her?

What did it do to her when the person she had built her life around couldn’t even spare her enough time to look at her and ask how she was doing?

I pressed a hand over my face, dragging it down slowly as the shame burned through me.

Why hadn’t I thought about that?

One person drowning is better than two.

What a fucking cop-out.

Who died and made me king of what she could and couldn’t handle?

The truth was uglier than that. Simpler.

It had been easier to suffer alone than risk letting her see how afraid I was. Easier to bury myself in work until exhaustion left no room for anything else. Easier to convince myself that shutting her out was some noble sacrifice than admit the truth: I was terrified of failing in front of the one person whose opinion mattered most.

I had dressed it up in better words. Protection. Responsibility. Love. None of them changed what I had done. I had been so terrified of being seen as weak that I had chosen cowardice every single time.

And then she came back.

After almost dying. After I had spent days knowing there was a chance I would never hear her voice again, never see her walk through a room, never have the chance to tell her what she meant to me.

She came back, and I still found a way to make everything about what I needed.

I begged her to stay when she wanted to leave. I threatened to fight her when she talked about divorce. I dragged her from one old place to another, chasing memories through streets and rooms and corners of our past, trying to summon the woman I remembered back into the body of the woman standing in front of me.

I told myself that was the goal.

If she remembered us, everything would fall back into place.

I had convinced myself that my job was to bring my Alessia back.

But what about her?