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A Love That Destroys Them - Part 3
<p>It happened on a Sunday. Gabriel had gone downstairs to check the mail. She stood in his kitchen, making tea she did not want, and heard his voice through the open window, speaking to someone she could not see.</p><p>A woman answered.</p><p>Elena set the kettle down. She listened. She could not make out words, only tones, warm. She had not heard him sound warm with anyone else. Warm was a currency he spent only on her.</p><p>The kettle screamed. She did not lift it.</p><p>When he came back, she was sitting in the armchair facing the wall. Who was that?</p><p>The neighbor, he said. Mrs. Chen. She asked about my mother.</p><p>Elena nodded. She believed him. It did not help. The problem was not whether he had done something. The problem was that she had stood in his kitchen and felt her sanity crack because he had spoken to someone else. Love had made her into someone who could not survive a conversation she had not witnessed.</p><p>I need to go back to my apartment, she said.</p><p>He looked at her. You mean leave.</p><p>I mean sleep in my own bed. I mean remember what it feels like to be alone and not die from it.</p><p>The words came out harsher than she intended. She could not tell anymore where her voice ended and the love began.</p><p>Gabriel sat on the floor. If you go back, I will follow you. Not because I do not trust you. Because I do not trust myself without you.</p><p>She looked down at him. His face was the same face that had opened the door on the eighth night, but older now, or simply more honest. She saw in it what she had become: not a person, but a condition of survival.</p><p>That was when she understood. The love was not destroying them because they were weak. It was destroying them because it was perfect. Two organisms feeding each other until neither could exist alone.</p><p>She did not go back to her apartment that night. She did not go back the next night. The radiator in 4A stopped clanking, and neither noticed, because the wall had ceased to exist. Without it, there was no here or there, no her or him, only the love expanding to fill every room, every silence, every breath, until the air itself became too thin to sustain them.</p>
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