Page 95 of The Circle of Exile
Iram pressed her mouth into the top of his head.
“The world is crumbling, Iram.”
“I’m here to hold it up with you.”
“But are you?”
“I am here. I cannot be anywhere else but here.”
Silence. Only the occasional shudder of his breath, the hiccuping of his trailing sobs.
“Hayat.”
She stilled.
“They asked me to give her a name and I called her Hayat.”
“For the life she gave her brother?”
“I didn’t know it then. All I knew was that she deserved that life.”
“I am sorry I couldn’t make it happen.”
He sat up, gasping and rubbing his hands down his face. Reddened grey eyes pierced into hers — “You heard Dr. Baig. It wasn’t on you. Couldn’t be. If at all it started… it started with me. Your stresses that day were not yours alone.”
Iram stared at him — “And if I tell you that they weren’t yours either?”
He chuckled bitterly, pinching the bridge of his nose clean of tears. “How are we going to come out of this loop, Iram?”
“You know,” she leaned in on his shoulder and scrubbed the remainder of his tears off his cheek, the bristles of his stubble hard on her palms. “I read somewhere that a man lost in a jungle will always circle back to the place where he feels the safest. Guilt is where we feel the safest. No?”
He nodded. As long as they remained in guilt, they could live in the past.
“In my better moments, I have been thinking. How it is always so easy to circle back to my old habits. Of escaping, of shutting down, of going into survival mode. And for you to take the hits on yourself, take somebody leaving as them leavingyou. The remainders of our histories still burn somewhere within us, Atharva. And we feel the safest there.”
The back of his hand rubbed the tear tracks on her jaw, his broken eyes shining with affection too. How was it that they were able to experience and project such a strange mix of emotions onto each other? How was their grief soul-sucking but then a light moment also life-giving? Whichever god made it possible, she thanked him with every fibre of her being. That even this misery she got to bear with him. Nobody but him.
“Once you had said that you wouldn’t accept happiness if it came without me,” Iram reminded him. He nodded, gaze trained on clearing her cheek of drying tears.
“I thank god that I get to bear my every misery with you.”
His gaze finally rose and met hers. Their eyes held. Words ceased to be. Losses of their lives were uncountable. Even if they managed to sit one day and count them all, they were unbearable. Individually. Together, they had managed to shoulder them this far. With new grief added onto those, and their souls strengthened after this storm, she was now more convinced than ever that they would succeed in not only bearing them but continue walking with them. Maybe even running again someday.
“You want to walk out of this jungle with me, myani zuv?” He held his hand out to her. She did not have to think even for a second before her hand gave itself to his. His fingers tightened around hers, like they had that first time under the handcart, like they had outside her father’s house, just before walking her to their marriage altar.
“It’s scary if we don’t find our way out,” Iram warned, having navigated the routes out of the maze of her mind and circled back a few times.
“We’ll be together.”
The baby monitor speaker blew up with a tiny squeak. Their heads fell together, laughing.
“He’s got good timing,” Iram curved her arm around his neck, pressing her face into the crook of his jaw. Old Spice and sleep and tears.
“He’s gotgreattiming,” Atharva’s mouth pressed into the top of her head.
“Do you forgive me?” She pushed back.
“It wasn’t your fault.”
