Paul

I wondered if ever he was tired of waiting for someone to talk to him first. Because he always waited. In the hallway walking toward him he would not smile nor wave nor say hi unless you smiled or waved or said hi first. I remember in class he never asked questions and never answered them.

            When I met him after college, he was reading the book I was looking for. It was called Jane Eyre, which went out of print and there remained only a handful of copies left. It was a rare luxury to have such a book in your possession.

            After we married, he would tell me about his dreams he dreamt every night. They were all strange and ethereal to me. I became jealous of him whenever in those few words he told me how real everything appeared inside his eyes. As if nothing was real inside this world. I never dream. So listening to him always made me want to go to bed, to see if something happened inside my own eyes. There is a reason why I never dream. I am an insomniac and in those sleepless nights I write him letters. Letters about what I would like to dream about and whether he is still waiting.

            Dear Paul,

            It is raining outside and I can hear the raindrops quietly drumming the ceiling. They make me think of your dreams, how it would rain at six in the morning and you would stand in this room, holding a yellow umbrella. “It was raining inside,” you told me. How all the books on our shelf dripped of black liquid because the rain was washing away the ink.

            I wish I could dream about you, to understand the parts of you that I fail to understand now and before. To find out why you often sing and only sometimes talk

            And at the end of every letter I would write, Until when will you wait? Then I would quietly place it on the piano next to his dense sheets of music. We never talked about the letters, but I knew he read them and kept them somewhere.

            I think there is something behind or beneath him that he avoids to tell me. I know he has a remarkably good memory that sometimes scares me. He remembers every meticulous detail, about a face or a sound or anything else. I imagine it must be immensely difficult to live a life like that. To carry with you the memories and dreams and times you hardly speak of.

            There is no distinct reason why I decided to marry him. Rather, I wanted to read Jane Eyre with him, loved him because he did not mind being together. He liked to be hugged and was always hungry. And in that way, he was still a child. He used rare words like “lovely” and “quaint” when he spoke. No one talked like that anymore. I loved him also because I did not want him to wait. To love him was to stop him from waiting.