I Told Him That I Loved Him

This piece is part of a writing assignment that I had for my Beginning Fiction Writing class for the Fall 2021 semester.

The prompt:

Write 300-500 words using first person (“I”) in which a character makes a confession about something they feel guilty about. It doesn’t have to be a crime or murder. Perhaps they hurt someone in a small yet terrible way. Perhaps they betrayed or disappointed themselves by doing the one thing they always vowed against. Perhaps they broke a promise...etc.

________

I told him that I loved him. It wasn’t a crime at first, just an 18 year old girl's naive and ill conceived notion about what love really was.

I told him that I loved him every morning and believed it to be true, but was thankful he was leaving for work so I could kick off the sheets from his side of the bed and sink into the coldness that I wished was always there.

I told him that I loved him every night, elated that my dreams would transport me to the body of a girl who was living a life she loved in a place that was far away from my suffocating marriage bed and the incessantly angry person who laid in it with me.

I told him that I loved him. My last kiss to him sealed my commitment to breaking the commitment I made with him those three years and eleven months earlier. I slipped a check into the old purse that he would not let me replace. The worn faux leather straps had been tied and re-tied half a dozen times before and I worried each day that it would break for good. I hoped they would, maybe then he would let me get a new purse.

I told him that I did not love him, the words overflowed from my mouth like a broken levee. Far was the day of a long white dress in a small courthouse, now was the early morning sun in a baking parking lot with landscapers mowing lawns and pulling weeds, forcing ignorance and acting as witnesses to the end of a marriage and the beginning of a broken home.

Love isn’t anger when dinner doesn’t turn out right. It is not bending the branches of a hickory to match the draping wisps of a willow.

In the mornings after he left for work, I would dream that he would not make it home. That is not love. I know that now.

Love is independence and leaving space in closeness for the winds of the future to hum between swaying branches. It is contentment in the silence that falls on taking the long way home because the lights on Park Avenue look particularly beautiful in the rain. It is loving all of them even if they are far away and their side of the bed is cold.

My only crime is telling him I loved him. I tried so hard to tie the knots of that old purse together again, but they were too frayed and my hands had grown tired.

For him, the three word sentence was but another crime added to his extensive rap sheet on what he did to me. Maybe he believed he loved me, but if he truly did, he would have not treated me that way. If he truly loved me, he would have let me buy a new purse.

I told him that I loved him