An emotion of great delight

I was becoming familiar with this feeling, these wings beating in my chest, this desperate acceleration of emotion. I couldn’t breathe around it, couldn’t see around it, couldn’t have imagined my heart could fissure and fuse, fissure and fuse on into infinity.

“I still love you,” he whispered. “I still love you and I don’t know how to stop.”

I felt something snap inside of me, felt something sever. I stared at him with a trembling hope. My soggy mind didn’t know what it was doing. My own name pressed against my tongue.
Shadi meant joy, and all I ever did was cry.

I felt a key click into the clockwork of my heart then, felt a terrifying turning in my chest that promised to keep me going, to buy me more time in this searing life. I felt it, felt my body restart with a climbing, aching fear. I feared that something was changing, that maybe I was changing, that my entire life was shedding a skin it had outgrown at last, at last.
It scared me.
I didn’t know how to handle the shape of hope. I didn’t know how such a thing might fit in my body. I was so afraid, so afraid of being disappointed.

Until tonight I’d never even considered we might be happy again; I’d never dreamed we might use the broken pieces of our old life to build something new. I’d thought, for so long, that this pain I clenched every day in my fist would be my sole possession, all I ever carried for the rest of my life.

They probably knew I was up to no good even now, but perhaps they’d also seen something in my face, understood how I might be feeling, that I needed to leave. Run for my life.

“God alone,” he said, his voice shaking, “God alone knows the depth of my regrets.”

I had no right to drag Shayda down with me. Had no right to steal the joy from her body. It was not my fault that I could not bend my heart to behave as hers did, and it was not her fault that she couldn’t do the same for me. I supposed we really were just different, in the end.

I seldom understood my sister, and did not understand her then, either. I didn’t know how she could love a complicated man without it complicating her love. I didn’t know how her mind sorted and prioritized emotion; I didn’t know how she’d landed here—looking incandescent—after all we’d been through.

It was made clear, time and time again, that it was not our place to exercise harsh, human judgment over those whose hearts we did not know.