Everytime he leaves, I feel my heart shatter into a zillion pieces. There's a lump in my throat I can't get down, a cry waiting to slip out, a tingling in my fingers aching to clutch his arm to keep him from going. I watch him leave, my eyes filled with sad, childlike desperation as I whisper a quiet prayer for something to change and keep him from leaving.
Then I tell myself... Fariha, it's only a business trip. He'll be back Thursday.
There are times my mind can get carried away, my imagination running rampant, taken hostage by nonsense fears. I woke up in the middle of the night and watched him sleep, watched him breath... the world getting warmer each time he breathed out. A thought crossed my mind that I tried to shove away instantly and for that reason alone I believe it became stronger.
What if this was the last time I saw him?
You're an idiot, I told myself. He'll be back before the end of the week, like he's come back before. You'll be with him soon like you always are. There's no reason to indulge in this nonsense.
But what if... ?
We take life and health so much for granted. But do we really know? When we say "Insha Allah" does that not inherently imply the risk that God may decide to end our life any time? I will see him Thursday, Insha Allah - if God Wills to let him live that long, or if He Wills to let me live that long. So my fear may not be so unfounded. It may not be nonsense.
What a child you are, Fariha! Grow up!
I put up this calm facade to keep him from worrying about me, but he doesn't know. In the hours after he's gone I try to recall and document every moment of my life that I have spent with him. I go through his closet just to sense the smell of him in his clothes. I go around, meet friends, watch tv, read a magazine or two, but I am just obssessed with the thought of him. I recall happy moments we've had with each other, and sad ones. Sometimes I'll laugh to myself and sometimes I'll cry. I'll clear out the memory of my mobile phone so I can receive his sms's, but not before painstakingly writing down all of his messages on a piece of paper that I will hang on to like gold. I'll scribble the corny joke he made yesterday on the back of my grocery list and stash it away in my "memory box".
I go through a milder form of this almost everyday as he leaves for work. It's not a paralyzing condition. Surely I continue my daily activities as any normal person would, except I keep waiting for his mandatory phone call. I think about whether he's had lunch or not, if his boss has been relatively good to him today, if he's drinking enough water, if he's driving carefully. And in one of those rare moments where I stand outside myself and observe, I find it strange that I am still so caught up in him, so desperate for him after almost 6 years of being married to him, still obsessing over him like a teenager with a crush. Oh, by the third year you're usually ready to toss each other off a bridge, someone had once told me. I remember when we met people in the first year of our marriage, couples who had been married hardly three or four years (no kids), they would refer to us as "lovebirds" and the wives would tell me that the excitement dies down after a while and things are much different later on. Different? Yes I guess they are. I don't think I obsessed as much the first year as I do now.
It'll be okay... just pray for him, for his safety, for his health. God will bring him back, just like He always does. Just, for goodness sake, get out of his closet already!!
You know that part about maintaining whatever sanity I have left? I really ought to blog more often.
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