Valentine's Day
401 Words
It was our third Valentine’s Day together, and I was eagerly waiting for him. I got ready with care. Dress, high heels, red lipstick, sweet perfume, manicured nails. I spent a good amount of time fixing my hair. By 7 PM I was already ready, waiting for him to come back from work. He didn’t answer calls or messages. I thought maybe he was preparing some surprise for me, but when the clock struck eleven at night, I realized the only surprise would be if he remembered to come home.
The calls and messages no longer went through or were even completed, and at that moment I found myself in an anxiety and panic attack, believing something might have happened. That he could have died.
When the clock struck one in the morning, I decided to take off my makeup, tie my hair up, put on an old sweatshirt, and surrender myself to the emptiness of my existence, my non-existence, the extreme loneliness.
I woke up the whole family and friends with worried calls about my husband who hadn’t shown up at home. They tried to calm me down — “He must be working! He might have found a friend and is chatting…” — there were endless things they told me to help me keep ignoring what was in front of me.
However, my emotional dependence was stronger than any other feeling inside me, so when he arrived at sunrise looking unconcerned, even worse, with an expression of disdain, I could only thank him for coming back safe, since I was very afraid of losing him to something or someone.
He didn’t say a full sentence and just explained that he had doubled his shift, that he would earn more, he was tired and going to sleep.
He passed by me with an unfamiliar perfume lingering. A sweet, penetrating scent.
It wasn’t his perfume — I had given it to him myself and knew it well. But I lay beside him and finally slept peacefully in the company of the man I loved.
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I fell into the void, and thought there was no way back. I didn’t want to come back. I didn’t want to leave either, but I wanted the pain to go away. It was either the pain or me, and there I was once again, pathetic, a joke, because I couldn’t even die right.
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- Writer
