Silent Conversations

“You don’t love me, do you?” she asked.

This was her favorite question. Although the answer never was what she expected, she loved to anticipate.

“I don’t”, he replied.

She went on doing the chores; folding clothes and stacking them in the cupboard, filling water in the bottle for the night, putting moisturizer on her hand and feet that had dried and roughened after a long Saturday at home cleaning the window nets, scrubbing the floor, washing the dishes and wiping the glass windows and mirrors sparkling clean.

Before she turned the lights off, she decided to finish a chapter from the book she was reading ‘The Seduction of Silence’ written by Bem Le Hunte.  

As she was pretending to read, her husband was lying with his face turned away from her. The silence weighed in and she could tell that he was playing a game on his phone, his favorite hobby. She curled up her legs up to her chest. Not once did he bother to peer out from the blanket to see what she was doing. They hadn’t had a fight or anything. Her husband was a man of few words. It was rare of him to start an argument or provoke his wife for a fight. They had dated for three years before they got married two years ago. They had busy weekdays and spent only few hours awake with each other which were mostly spent in kitchen preparing and eating meals. During the weekends, he mostly invited his friends and family to share meals and spent idle evenings with a TV remote in hand while she cleaned and scrubbed every nook and corner of the house during the day and relaxed and read in the evenings.

They had met through a common friend while she was celebrating her birthday in a fancy bar in town five years ago. Two years into marriage and she had asked herself a couple of times if it was the right decision to marry someone who spoke so less, made no public or private display of affection and never seemed to care what his wife ate for lunch every day at work.

With her husband still turned away, she wondered why was there this recurring need for reassurance to the point where her husband stopped being bothered to reassure her. She was a strong, independent woman who didn’t need anyone to tell anything to her to make her feel good about herself. So every time she asked her husband if he loved her, she replied to herself instead.

May be he didn’t say those three magical words as much as she’d wish him to but he always let her have that last bite from everything he was eating. She’d get the last bite from the sausage roll he ate and he always left some bacon in the plate from the carbonara he ate. Yes, she envied how some husbands and boyfriends made so much effort to surprise their wives and girlfriends on birthdays and valentine’s days. But she also found her love comfort every time she came home from work to a well prepared snacks or a chilled drink in the fridge. Although she would wish him to hold hands in public while they walked, she knew it was ok because he’d hold him the tightest and tuck her to sleep every night.

She pondered over it for a while more and then put her book away, turned the lights off and turned towards her husband and put her arms around him. A minute later, he turned towards her, put his hand on her back and rubbed it, kissed her on her forehead and drifted off to sleep, warm and in arms together.