A short ( actually short this time, it was under 1000 words required ! This is 976 words. ) story for the bounty from Kateb_VonShoat ; Love, but not like that.
I used to think love meant staying.
When I was little, love was my father taking me on bike rides to the river, and my mother brushing my hair so gently I almost fell asleep sitting up. Love was the three of us on the couch, knees touching, the old boxy TV playing while I huddled close to them. I loved them with the kind of certainty only children possess, completely, unquestioningly.
Then my father fell in love with someone else.
He didn’t say it like that. He said grown-up words that I couldn't really grasp. But what I understood was this : he packed a suitcase, and love did not keep him.
It was all right, I told myself. I still had my mother. She began smiling at her phone in the evenings, tilting the screen away from me as if it held a fragile bird. I would sit at the kitchen table doing homework, listening to the soft rhythm of her typing. If I was quiet enough, good enough, easy enough, she would stay.
She didn’t.
One morning she knelt in front of me, her hands warm on my shoulders, and explained about a man who lived very far away. About how brave I was. She promised it wasn’t forever. She promised she loved me more than anything.
Then she left to live on the other side of the country, and I stayed behind in the apartment with two cats and the uncertainty of a child that has to figure out how to live by herself.
I was barely a teenager. I learned how to stretch groceries. I learned how to get to school by myself. I learned to sign school papers myself. I learned to keep quiet.
At night, I would lie in my bed with a cat pressed against my ribs and imagine that love was elastic. That no matter how far it stretched, it would snap back and pull us together again. I never stopped loving them. That was the strange part. My love did not shrink to match their absence. It remained enormous, a bright, unwieldy thing I had to carry alone in this bizarre world.
Eventually my father came back for me. Not alone, he had a wife now. She wore perfume that smelled like flowers trying too hard. She had sons already, but she looked at me as if I was something she could arrange on a shelf.
For a while, she loved me in her way. She bought me dresses for the first time and brushed my hair and called me her girl. I let myself bloom under it. I loved her carefully at first, then all at once. I loved the way she took my hand in public. I loved my father for coming back. I loved the idea that this was what staying looked like.
But we moved. And moved again. Cities blurred into highways, highways into rental houses, rental houses into new schools where I was always the girl who had just arrived. I learned how to fold myself small on the first day of class. Love, I discovered, can be restless.
When we finally stopped near the sea, I thought perhaps we had outrun the leaving. The air tasted like salt, and the light felt softer there. For a few years, I was almost happy. I had a window that faced the water. I began to imagine a future that did not fit inside a suitcase.
But children grow, and dolls do not.
I grew taller. I had opinions. I always wanted to know why. The woman who once dressed me up began to look at me as if I was a stain she couldn’t scrub out. I heard my name in her sighs. I felt it in the way her hands no longer lingered. She had loved me as long as I was easy to love.
I still loved her. That was the unbearable part. I loved her even as she found me irritating, even as her patience thinned to threads. I loved my father, who stood between us and said nothing sharp enough to cut the tension.
When they told me I would be leaving again, I nodded. I had practice.
My mother returned for me as if picking up a coat she had once forgotten. She looked older. I did too. We stood facing each other in that small rental house, two strangers now.
She said she had always loved me and I believed her.
That is the trouble with me, I always believe in love.
I moved back into her life like a guest unsure of the rules. I did not ask why. Why loving me had not been enough to keep her. By then, my love had changed shape. It was no longer bright and boundless. It was fractured, like a mirror dropped but not shattered, every piece still reflecting the same face, just at different angles.
I loved my father. I loved my mother. I loved them in spite of themselves, in spite of the leaving, in spite of the moving, in spite of the way each of them had chosen something else when staying became difficult.
Maybe love is not staying.
Maybe it is the quiet act of continuing.
I continued to love them as I learned to cook for myself, as I memorized new bus routes, as I folded my clothes into drawers. I loved them when I stopped expecting them to come back. I loved them when I understood that they already had, just never in the way I needed.
There is a version of me, still small, sitting on a couch between two warm bodies, believing that love can nail the world in place.
I do not correct her. I'll let her believe it.
And I learned to love her, too, once more.