Chapter 18 – Stretched Thin.

The second trip was longer than the first. The third was longer than the second. Somewhere between the third and the fourth I stopped counting in weeks and started counting in Fridays missed, which felt more honest about what it was actually costing me. School had swallowed me whole by then. Final year had arrived with all its attendant chaos deadlines stacking on deadlines, the particular exhaustion of trying to finish something you've been building for years, the sense of being squeezed from every direction by things that all felt urgent at the same time. I had less time. He had less time. The calls that had once been long and wandering started fitting themselves into smaller windows, getting interrupted, getting cut short. We adapted. That's what you do. You adapt and you tell yourself that this is just a season, that it won't always be this stretched, that the shape of things will return to normal when the pressure lets up. But pressure has a way of not letting up. It just changes form. The Friday rule became more complicated. Some weeks it held I'd make it to him or he'd make it to me and we'd fall back into the rhythm like no time had passed, the ease of us reasserting itself over the difficulty of everything else. Those evenings felt like exhaling. Like coming up for air. But some weeks it didn't hold. Work on his end, school on mine, timing that refused to cooperate. And a missed Friday was fine once. Fine twice. But it started to accumulate, and accumulation has a weight. I noticed it in small ways first. The way a silence on a call could sit differently than it used to not the comfortable kind, the kind with texture in it. The way I'd say something and feel, for a half-second, like I was talking to a version of him that was slightly far away even when he was right there on the line. I didn't say anything. That was my particular failure in this I noticed and I didn't say. I filed things away instead, kept my face smooth and my voice easy, told myself I was being sensible and not dramatic. He was doing something similar, I think. We were both being very reasonable and very adult about everything, and somewhere underneath all that reasonableness something was quietly accumulating that neither of us was looking at directly. The physical had changed too. Not disappeared when we did see each other it was still all-consuming, still the thing that made everything else make sense for a few hours. But the frequency had dropped, and I felt that in a way I didn't want to admit I felt it. Not just the wanting of him though that was real enough but what the absence of it meant. Like a barometer reading. Like a way of knowing how things actually were beneath the surface. I started keeping myself busy in a way that was slightly too deliberate. He started travelling in a way that was slightly too frequent. Neither of us said anything about any of it. And the stretch continued, quiet and slow, and we held on because we loved each other, because we were stubborn, because neither of us was willing to be the first one to say out loud that something was pulling apart at the seams.

Forbidden Love Story

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