Chapter Six — — What He Carried After

Chapter Six

What He Carried After

He carried the question. For years. Not the question of whether she had ever felt anything — Saad had answered that with his usual directness, and the answer had been no. The question he carried was different and harder: does the love count for something, even in the absence of return? Is the feeling real if it was only ever on one side?

He concluded, eventually, something less poetic and more honest: the love was real. The realness was not diminished by the absence of return. The three years of changed behavior — the board switch, the study sessions, the sentences prepared and swallowed — were evidence of something genuine in him. The first genuine thing he had organized his life around. That it had not resulted in the thing it reached toward was not a comment on the reaching. The reaching had value independent of its outcome.

This conclusion took years to arrive at. In the years before it arrived, he lived with the unresolved question in the way that unresolved questions are lived with — not always in the foreground, not always dominating, but present in the background the way certain music is present after you have heard it: not always audible but always somewhere in the system, shaping the quality of everything else.

Some loves do not resolve. They become part of the person — part of the formation, the education, the specific shape of the self that reaches toward other people and either finds them or does not. The first love that is not returned does not teach you that love is impossible. It teaches you that love is real and that reality includes the possibility of its absence from the other side. This is a painful lesson. It is also a true one. The true ones always cost something worth paying.