Being in Love with Love

Every girl has a fairy tale. Even if she is a hard core feminist, some long long time ago, when she was a young teenager, before her first heartache, I'm sure she had a fairy tale she wanted to believe in.

Mine, is a classic. Feeding each other spaghetti, clinking our sweating glasses of Champagne. Somewhere in the not so far distance, stand our home, stone and vines crawling up its walls. My little daughter and her brother off somewhere picking berries for our dessert. He tenderly kisses my cheek, and twirls a strand of my hair, musing about how beautiful our life is...

I'm enrolled in a university somewhere in Rome, I study fashion design or architecture or just language, I  spend time in the old libraries, study on the sprawling lawns....I'm a working mum, I own my own line of clothes and perfume, I write novels and publish them, we own a small cafe, where we serve pasta and wine and italian coffee..... I garden and cook for my family with the vegetables and herbs I grow in my garden. He pulls me into his embrace as I make dinner, soft sweet whispers of nothings in my ear and I turn around and give him a little lick of the wooden spatula of whatever I'm cooking. Life is busy, but never too busy for me to spend time with my family and my loving husband. On weekends we cycle to the market, just like young couples on a date, giggling and laughing and teasing each other. We have lunch with our parents, aunts, uncles and in-laws and siblings, outdoors in our vineyard, my children growing up close to their cousins. 

Evenings curled up in front of the fire, cozy and drowsy, we read books out loud, or watch an old movie, snow falls lightly like feathers outside our window...

Every night I watch as he falls asleep, softly tracing the outlines of his face, awed by how great Allah is, how wonderful life is, and how beautiful my kids are. A combination of me and him, green eyes, brunette wavy hair, stubborn and determined like me, in love with music and art and dance and soccer like their dad.

My fairy tale, what has become of it, time passed and I feel I'm losing grip, it's fading away, my beautiful husband, my gorgeous kids....the life I want so desperately. 

 

Time

They say the tides of time can change everything. It can flood over and stimulate growth, healthy growth of respect, mutual understanding, maturity and most of all remind you of why you loved in the first place. It can also go warily wrong. Damage already rusted pillars of trust, corrode in corners with envy, fill hearts with impatience. Potent enemies like 3rd parties seek this time to take over, when your at your weakest, most vulnerable. 

I'm a woman, it is in my instinct to take care of the ones I love, to nurture the relationship with too much love, too much care, I'll spoil you rotten, just for the pleasure of seeing you smile. Your smile lights up my day. I constantly worry, I'm not doing enough, I'm not partaking enough or sharing enough, I'm scared because I know, I'm human and I can be selfish sometimes. And then I worry, I so want to be perfect, to do everything right for us.

As I sit silently and watched you today, I was sick, very sick and very scared and it registered to me that I'm not the one you're caring about at the moment. Your mind is somewhere else, somewhere worrying about her. Where do I stand in all this? Do I matter? I asked you and your answer is I've got a headache and I don't want to talk, all I want is to switch off my phone and be alone. Is that you talking me? The one who I patiently loved, and cared and put you before everyone and everything else. I have loved you selflessly all this while, I backed down for every single argument because I can't stand hurting you, I convinced myself that you love me but perhaps you don't know how to show it. But now as I lay here pondering with tears running down my face, what if you're my everything but I'm nothing to you...

"The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love."

what trust means...

I trust you because I love you but you don't respect me enough to even think for a second how I'll feel before you do something. You've decided, end of discussion. You expect me to trust you no matter what. I do but I think you take my feelings for granted.