I had put down thoughts of this week, a tumultuous week that was inadvertently spent spilling my own secrets to him, because I had felt pressured to do so, my guilt festering like an ugly pustule fed his comments on how he felt he didn't deserve me, or his praises that I seemed so angelic. So this week I spent crying buckets, him getting angry and yelling at me, calling me an ostrich for blotting them out of my mind and treating these matters so wantonly and then questioning my judgement behind the execution of my decisions. But I had so desperately wanted to dispel his notion that I was perfect. A friend had comforted me later by saying that it's all normal, that I was a normal girl, and such a good girl on the whole, and that it was ridiculous of him to have gotten angry at him over such banalities. At that point, I just wished these words had come from him instead.
Wednesday dusk was spent at the city hall rooftop garden, the waning light dulling the green in the grassy patches surrounding the wooden bench we sat on, the two bottles of water he had thoughtfully brought for us demarcating our sides. I could barely look at him as I spoke. We moved to his car later on as the weather got chillier, and I cried for a few good hours. He finally calmed down and held my hand, telling me he did indeed accept me completely for who I was, and that our relationship was never in jeopardy. I just tried my best to stop the tears from rolling down my cheeks.
Over the next few days, I grappled with my decision to have revealed so much to him, waking up feeling pangs of shame and uneasiness to the point I entertained the idea of not seeing him the coming weekend. Fortunately he reminded me, through our marathon phone sessions, that his past was grittier (according to him), and retold his stories in explicit detail just for my benefit. I felt immensely better after that. He was essentially trying to tell me that he's human too, imperfect, just like me.
All this seems so far away now, yet it happened just only a couple of days ago. I do feel closer to him now, and he tells me the same. I've fallen for him hard enough to feel my heart ache, and it scares me a bit. Today we talked about the finality of marriage, about how I was 'it for him', that he worries that I might not feel like I've been around enough to value what we currently have, but that he has no solution to that matter. He asked me what it felt like to love someone. I said that you know you love someone when you can actually feel your heart ache at the thought of losing them. Why do you ask, I said. He said he had never loved anyone before, but felt like we were moving in that direction.
Once, his friend had told us a story about the first date with his fiancée-to-be. They were in his car, and he was going to run a red light, but had decided against it since it was a first date and all. But she asked him to run it anyway. And that's when he knew, through that one detail, that she was the one for him.
We took a trip together two weeks ago. He drove us to Montreal and on our way back, I was incredibly sick and ended up falling asleep in the car, despite protesting at his orders for me to rest and desperately trying to stay awake to keep him company. I woke up one and a half hours later to him still driving, the sun shining on me, but also to the car sun shade tilted sideways to my side window because he tried to block the sun from my face. He had also told me he had wanted to buy sun shades for my side window before our trip but couldn't find any. That's when I knew, at that one point in time, that he was the one for me.
