Almost bright enough
I carry the map of his small comforts, while mine stays folded in a drawer.
He is not unkind. That is the difficult part. He is a good man who has never had to look closely. I keep the details of his life: his allergies, his mother's birthday, the way he takes his eggs. Somewhere along the way, I began to think love meant remembering everything about another person while quietly hoping they would notice that I had favorites too.
He has not noticed. Not because he is cruel, but because I made it easy not to.
The blue wrapped itself around my hands, and I handed back a sunlit face.
The smile arrives before I can think. It comes before disappointment has finished forming, a reflex that reaches the surface ahead of everything real. “I love it,” I hear myself say, my voice warm and bright. For a moment, I almost believe it. He smiles, pleased.
That is what unsettles me at night. Not that he got it wrong, but that I am so practiced at making him feel he got it right. I wonder when happiness performed for someone else became my first language.
Somewhere, a truer expression is waiting behind the one I offer first.
I have begun to notice myself in mirrors during these moments: my eyes narrow at the corners, my head tilts, my voice rises. The expression looks complete, a delighted woman, ready and convincing, moving without anyone directing her. Sometimes I wonder whether there was ever another smile underneath it, a slower, quieter one that belonged only to me.
My face learned to be kind in ways he never asked for, and I learned to offer that kindness before I had decided whether I felt it.
After the lights go out, the quiet asks what this life is asking of me.
The question does not arrive as a crisis. It is smaller than that, and more constant, like a radio playing in another room. Is this the rest of my life? Forty more years of remembering, smiling on cue, and keeping my own favorites in a private collection no one visits?
I am not planning an escape. I am not even sure there is an exit. We built this life together, and much of it is good. Some nights, the question is not whether I will leave. It is whether I ever learned how to stay as myself.
I have polished the mask so carefully that sometimes it feels like a wedding ring.
The part that frightens me most is how easily the act can look like the marriage. The smile is so practiced that it feels like devotion, and the quick “I love it” feels like generosity. Maybe this is what love costs, I tell myself: a small erasure, a cheerful adjustment.
Then I think of my mother. She knew what everyone liked and seemed to have no favorites of her own. I wonder whether I am learning to disappear in the same way.
If I walked toward my own color, would the person beside me know who was coming?
This is the question I keep returning to in the dark. It is not only about leaving the performance. It is about whether I have been in it so long that the person underneath no longer knows what to say. Somewhere beneath the blue scarves is a woman with answers of her own. I do not think anyone has asked her for them.
I do not think I have asked her, either. I think she is still there, waiting for me to remember her as carefully as I remember his coffee order.
who are you, when no one is watching to be pleased?