The True Shame

With a deep breath, she pulled on her coat and tiptoed out of the cozy warmth of her home and into the icy night. There he stood, nonchalant as ever, leaning against his car as if nothing was wrong. Nothing was wrong, not really. Or perhaps there was just too much to put into words.

He looked up as her footsteps drew nearer and cast his cigarette aside. His smoking was a disgusting habit and she had previously refused to tolerate it, but she hardly had the right to chastise him now.

She stopped a few feet from him and looked him over. He was the same, more or less. He looked as if he had been working out – preparing himself for the dating scene, no doubt. He needed a haircut, as per usual, but he was just as lovely as ever. She had been told in the past that others did not find him attractive, but she always had. She saw the beauty in him. He had a kind soul, a great desire to do good, and an enchanting smile. His laugh used to ring in her ears for hours after they’d parted, along with his low, melodic voice. She always told him what a shame it was he was killing his voice with smoke.

He stood up straight and looked her in the eye. She took a step toward him but then jumped back, startled by her actions.

“What’s wrong?” He asked. After only hearing his voice in her head for months, it was an odd sensation to hear it in real life. She realized with a pang of disappointment that she had imagined it incorrectly. It was much lower than she remembered, and much smoother.

“Nothing, I –“ she stopped, unable to articulate what had caused her to step back. Habit had tried to force her into his arms, but logic had stopped her. She shuffled her feet. “I was going to hug you,” she admitted, “but I wasn’t sure if I should.”

“You can hug me,” he replied, a small smile playing on his lips. Everything was always a joke to him, even when she felt she could not smile to save her life.

“I don’t know if I want to,” she said in a small voice. She always felt very small when she was with him. Something about him took away not only her breath, but her voice. In better times, she had spoken to him through actions, through a reassuring hand or a simple smile. She had shown her love by making him her first priority, by caring so deeply for his happiness that she would do anything to preserve it. She did not realize until it was much too late that words were equally important.

“Okay.” He patted his pocket, nervously locating his cigarettes. “What did you want to talk about?”

What didn’t she want to talk about? It had been a year since she had seen him; she wanted to talk about what had changed, what had stayed the same, his family, his life. She wanted to know if his dreams had changed, if they were as spectacular as ever. She wanted to know when exactly he planned to take the world by storm.

“I, I wanted to tell you something,” she stuttered, staring at the hole in his jeans and the cancer between his fingers.

“Well,” he said, “not to be rude, but could you spit it out? I’m freezing my ass off out here.” He chuckled, taking a long drag from his cigarette.

Everything she had planned to say, the passionate words that burned inside her dimmed, and she lost her voice. “I just missed you,” she murmured.

“You just missed me,” he repeated.

“Yeah,” she replied lamely.

“Look, I don’t want to be a jerk, but you could have just texted me.”

“After all we’ve been through? That deserves a phone call at the very least,” she joked humorlessly.

“And yet I got an email begging me to come over,” he scoffed, clearly becoming frustrated. “What is this all about?”

“I want to make things right.”

“There is nothing to make right,” he said. His forced smile showed the fault lines in his calm façade.

“Don’t say that,” she begged. Her voice cracked under the strain of emotion. “Don’t say there’s nothing left between us.”

“There’s not.”

“How...How can you say that?”

“Look, it’s been a year. I’ve moved on, you should too.”

His words hung between them for a long moment. This was not how she anticipated the conversation would go. She did not understand how he couldn’t care when she still did so much.

“I cried for a month after we broke up.” Her voice began a whisper, but was growing higher and louder with every word, disturbing the silence of the night. “I would wake up in the middle of the night to check if you’d called, stay up way too late hoping you’d change your mind and talk to me. If you had seen me the day after it happened you would have felt horrible. You would have taken me back. If there was nothing between us, I wouldn’t have been so miserable without you.”

“And whose fault is that?” he snapped. His stare was unrelenting and something inside her broke. Her knees felt weak and grief and guilt raced to suffocate her.
She could not meet his eyes. She bit down on her bottom lip hard to keep herself from crying out.

“It was mine.”

“It was yours,” he replied slowly, nodding his head. “It was your fault. Nothing had to change, nothing had to end. You killed it.”

So she had.

“I had to,” she breathed. Her lip was bleeding where she had bitten it and the salty blood sat unpleasantly on her tongue.

He had been in the process of lighting a new cigarette when she spoke. The match between his fingers stayed quite still and burned down to his fingertips as he stared at her.

“You had to?” He spat. He stood up straight, his cigarette still dangling between his lips, and towered over her. “You had to commit murder?”

“There was no murder,” she whispered. Salty tears now escaped her eyes and nearly froze upon her cheeks.

“What would you call it, then?”

“A mistake. A mistake that we made and I took care of. It’s over! It’s all in the past. Why can’t we leave it there?”

"Because I loved you," he said bitterly, looking down on her. "Because I would have taken care of things and you didn't give me the chance."

"I loved you, too!" she insisted.

"No. You didn't."

"You have no right to say that." still crying, she advanced toward him, pointing a shaking finger into his chest. "I loved you. You have no idea how much."

"If that was true," he replied, his voice quivering slightly, "you wouldn't have done it."

"I did it to protect you! I wasn't about to let you throw your life away. You deserve more than that."

"And you?" he asked. "Don't you deserve better?"

"What do you mean?"

"You're going to hell for what you did. And so am I for not stopping you."

"I don't believe in hell," she whispered.

With that, she turned on her heel, leaving him standing alone with his convictions.

On her way back to the house, she stepped on the cigarette he had earlier cast aside, crushing the tiny ember beneath her foot. How curious that something could so easily be snuffed out.

She entered the house and locked the door. Only once inside did she realize how terribly cold she was, for she could not stop herself from shaking for several minutes.

Once composed, she tiptoed quietly to her bedroom. With great care to remain silent, she removed her coat and shoes and slipped beneath the covers. There, silence and loneliness overwhelmed her and she found herself wracked with sobs. They came in waves of pain and desperation as she tucked her head beneath the pillows to muffle the sound. However, her efforts were ultimately in vain, and she soon found her own cries echoed in the dark.

Forced by nature, she let go of her grievances and rose to tend to the cries. They emanated from the adjacent bedroom, where her smallest and greatest grievance wailed.

In a practiced motion she drew the child into her arms. At once, its complaints ceased; it cried only for being awoken from its dreams without a smile to wake up to.

It was a lovely child, with a healthy complexion and dark chocolate eyes. She had overheard the nurses in the hospital lamenting the shame that such a handsome child should be a bastard.

The true shame was that it needn't be a bastard, that its mother was simply more in love with its father than with the child itself. The true shame was that she had chosen to lie so that its father could follow his dreams, all while she sealed her own dreams neatly inside a little box, never to be opened again.

The true shame was that she had sacrificed her happiness for his, only to find that he was scarcely happy at all.

He believed himself hell bound, an eternal sinner. How glad he would be when he met his maker and discovered that his only sin was ignorance, that he would be allowed to live in eternal joy. Perhaps she would meet him there, and his gratitude for being saved from hellfire would inspire him to forgive.

Perhaps something higher would forgive her trespasses, and she would eventually be able to forgive herself.

Love is not rational, she thought as she returned to bed and rocked her child to sleep. Life is not kind to those who love and those who love are not always loved in return. Love makes people do senseless things and bring great pain upon themselves.

And sometimes, those who are fools for love are doomed to carry their great pain for all of their lives, quietly mourning all that never was and all could never be.


End.