Latika's Love
Chapter 1 - In the Kitchen
How do you show love? How do you express it? How do you know what to do with it when it shows up and it's standing there and it's staring at you with eyes blinking into the sunlight? What do you do with love, when you thought it was gone? When you thought it couldn't possibly come for you again? When you thought you had lost it, left it there at the end of a long empty hallway. Watched it vanish. Slammed shut behind a door you now knew led to here - to pity and powerlessness.
What do you do? Offer love a simple gesture? Try to hold love's hand? Do you run to it, and throw your arms around it, and feel its warmth against your skin, and hold its face in your hands, and ask it to never leave you? Do you cling to it? Do you tell it everything you're feeling inside? Or do you push it away? View it from afar. Distance is safety. Do you reject it? Tell it you're afraid? Yes, terrified that if you were to reach out and touch it, it would be gone, just a delusion, taken again. What do you do? when Jamal, that boy - that sweet, sweet boy - is standing there and he is in Javed's kitchen and he's come for you again?
I thought about love. I thought about how difficult it is to put into terms, not just the words, but everything that goes with it. Why does love stir some to action and others it renders motionless, paralyzed? I wanted to be brave for him. I wanted to conquer my fear and doubt and cross the gulf that stood between us, defeat the forces that kept up apart. I wanted to… for him… I wanted to… Didn't he know? Couldn't he see it? See it beneath this cold exterior, behind my biting words, inside my stationary heart. It was love I wanted. It was his arms I ached for. It was the pull of his heart to mine that dared me to be bold, to cast aside my inhibitions and run to his side. Didn't he know? I pleaded with my eyes as I looked up to search his. Didn't he know? As he placed his calm and steady hand around my trembling one. Didn't he know? That I too, loved him.
So what, I had said. What did it matter he was there now? What did it matter he was asking me to run, imploring me with those earnest, innocent eyes of his, to come, to come away with him. So what. Didn't he know it was too late? Where had love been? In my dreams? Yes. There. Every night. After it was finished, after my bruised and broken body had been returned to me, after my tears had dried, after I shut my eyes and prayed to forget, after the numbness slowly swallowed me again like morphine for my soul. Love was there. In another lifetime, I told myself, love would be something to be touched, something to be held, something to go inside of. Love would be a chest I would bury my face in and hear his beautiful heartbeat locked inside. Love would make it all fall away.