F A Y I Z

He didn't move.

She was gone. The waterfront was empty. Theodore was at his feet, looking up at him with the expression of a dog who had witnessed the most important moment of his owner's life and was waiting to be told what to do next.

Not fall in love with you.

The words were in the air. The words were in his chest. The words were doing something to the inside of him that he didn't have language for: not English, not Malayalam, not the private language he used with Theodore at 2 a.m. The words were rearranging the furniture. The words were changing the light.

She was in love with him.

She was in love with him and she had said it like it was a wound, like it was something she'd done wrong, like falling in love with him was a failure of the contract rather than the thing that had saved both of them from it. She was in love with him and she had walked away and he was standing on the waterfront with paint on his hands and a dog at his feet and the most important sentence of his life settling into his bones.

He should go after her. He should run. He should chase her up the hill and catch her arm and say... what? What would he say? I love you too? Was that true? Was that the word? He'd loved Rifa. He knew what that felt like... consuming, total, the whole canvas. This was not that. This was something he didn't have a canvas for. This was the colour he reached for first and the silence he'd learned to live inside and the tea he ordered before she arrived and the face he was painting with the left eye better than the right.

This was not Rifa. This was not the old love, the devotional love, the love that built shrines and burned when the shrine was empty. This was something else. Newer. Stranger. A love he didn't know the shape of because the shape was still forming, the way a painting formed: layer by layer, colour by colour, the image emerging not from certainty but from attention.

He stood on the waterfront. The wind hit him. He didn't move.

Because going after her required knowing who he was. And he didn't. He didn't know who he was. He was a man who had loved a woman and then loved a woman and the two loves were different species and the second one didn't have a taxonomy. He was a straight man who had felt his hands go white on a steering wheel when she said another woman's name. He was a painter who couldn't paint the face he cared most about because seeing it clearly meant seeing himself clearly and the self was blurred, the self was unresolved, the self was a canvas with too many layers and not enough light.

He didn't go after her.

He went to the diner.

•  •  •

The booth was empty. Both cups cold. The bell rang when he walked in and Saoirse looked up from the counter and saw his face and looked away, quickly, the way you looked away from something private.

He sat in the booth. In his seat. Across from her empty seat.

The worst view.

Two cold cups. The sugar bowl with the chip. The salt shaker. The space between where he sat and where she sat, the space he'd painted six times, the space that was never empty because it was full of every morning they'd spent in it.

Dottie came.

She didn't bring coffee. She came around the counter and stood beside the booth and looked at him and then she did something she had never done, in all the months he'd been coming here, in all the mornings and all the silences and all the refills: she put her hand on his shoulder.

Her hand was small. Warm. The hand of a woman who had been carrying things..  coffee pots, cloths, the weight of other people's mornings, for forty-three years. She put it on his shoulder and left it there.

"What happened?" she said.

"She told me."

"Told you what."

He looked at the empty seat. At the cold tea. At the lip print on the rim that was already fading.

"Everything."

Dottie was quiet. Her hand stayed.

"Then go find her," she said.

"I can't."

"Why."

"Because I don't know who I am, Dottie. I don't know what I am. She told me she's in love with me and I'm sitting in this booth and I can't tell you what that makes me because I don't have the word. I had the word for Rifa. I knew what that was. It was everything. It was the whole canvas. This is..." He pressed his hands flat on the table. "This is something I've never been. And I can't go to her without knowing what I am because she deserves a person who knows, Dottie. She's been guessing for months. She's been reading me like a painting and I've been giving her colours instead of words and she deserves words."

Dottie removed her hand. Slowly. She looked at him with an expression he'd never seen on her face, not the forty-three years, not the wisdom, not the Greek chorus. Something softer. Something that looked like the face of a woman who had watched a man become a person in her diner over six months and was now watching the last layer go on.

"The word," she said, "will come when you stop looking for it. It's like the coffee. You don't make it faster by watching the pot. You just have everything ready and you wait."

She went back to the counter.

He sat in the booth. The empty seat. The cold cups. The five days.

Theodore climbed up on the vinyl beside him. This was not allowed. Dogs were not allowed on the booth seats. Dottie had a policy. Theodore violated the policy with the calm authority of a dog who understood that policies were for days when the world was working and today the world was not.

He leaned against Fayiz's side. Warm. Solid. The whole body. The full-surrender lean.

Fayiz put his hand on Theodore's head.

Five days.

☕︎