The room was dim, lit only by the weak yellow bulb above the wardrobe. The ceiling fan hummed its tired, predictable rhythm; a sound so familiar it had disappeared into the background years ago. Outside, the streetlight threw a long, slanting beam through the half-closed window, dust motes drifting lazily in it like memories suspended in air.
He sat at the edge of the bed, polishing his glasses slowly, not because they were dirty but because his hands needed something to do. She was by the window, resting her arms on the sill, watching the quiet street below where nothing ever happened.
They didn’t talk much these days. They didn’t need to. Fifty years had made them fluent in each other’s silences. The way he cleared his throat meant he was thinking. The way she shifted her weight meant she was about to sigh. Words had become… decorative.
But tonight, perhaps because of the heavy air or the restless silence, she spoke.
“Do you ever feel,” she said softly, “like we’ve lived… two separate lives in the same house?”
He didn’t look up, but his hand stilled on the glasses. After a moment, he nodded.
“Yes,” he said simply.
There was no anger in it. No regret. Just acknowledgment.
She turned slightly, resting her head against the wooden frame of the window. “I used to think it was just me,” she said, almost like a confession.
“No,” he murmured, “it wasn’t just you.”
The fan creaked. A dog barked somewhere far away.
They didn’t touch, but their closeness was palpable, like an old blanket frayed at the edges but still warm. There had been love, once, maybe there still was, somewhere beneath the layers of habit and shared routines. But now, what bound them together was quieter than love, softer than longing. It was the comfort of knowing, the deep, bone-deep knowing of another human being who had walked beside you long enough to become a part of your shape.
She turned back to the window. “I thought,” she said, after a pause, “that one day I’d forget him.”
He didn’t ask who. He didn’t need to.
“And did you?” he asked gently.
She shook her head, smiling faintly, almost wistfully. “No. I just… stopped remembering on purpose.”
He set his glasses down on the bedside table and leaned back, his gaze lost in the ceiling’s slow-turning shadows. After a long silence, his voice came softer than before, carrying the weight of decades.
“I always knew,” he said.
Her head turned slightly, her eyes searching his face. “Knew?”
“The way you looked out of the train window on our wedding night…” He paused, his breath catching faintly, as if the memory had gathered dust but never faded. “You stared into the dark as though your whole world was behind you.”
She inhaled slowly, her lips parting, but no words came.
“I thought,” he continued quietly, “if I stayed long enough, if I became your everyday, maybe one day I’d be in that world you left behind.”
Her hand trembled on the windowsill. She wanted to say something; but the right words had eluded them for fifty years.
So, she walked to the bed and sat beside him, close enough that their knees brushed lightly. He didn’t look at her. She didn’t look at him.
Outside, the streetlight flickered once, then steadied.
After a long while, she whispered, “You were. You are. Just… not the way you thought.”
He nodded slowly, his eyes fixed somewhere far beyond the room.
They didn’t hold hands. They didn’t embrace. They simply sat there; two people who had built a life together without ever stepping fully into each other’s dreams.
It wasn’t love in the way it once was. It wasn’t passion. It wasn’t even need.
It was something quieter. Something heavier.
It was two lives so deeply entangled that even silence had grown roots,
in that slow gravity of Habits.
Comments
Post a Comment