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Added to MSR: 03.03.11

I’m killing myself.

Do we ever really learn? What keeps us holding on to something—and what keeps us from letting go? There are questions we don’t ask, answers we chase endlessly, and nothing ever seems to relieve the pain. The ache. The quiet frustration.

Why do we let ourselves suffer?

Lately, every time I talk to him, he feels distant. Disconnected. I’ve known this was coming. I’ve always known I would eventually lose what little I had left of him: his heart.

I remember our first year.
I remember the first time I could have let him go.
He was going to be married—to his niece. Arranged, as his grandmother wanted.
She was waiting for him.

He drove into the gated community where I lived in Stockton. A place full of white, polished houses. Beautiful on the outside. But sterile. Soulless. Like something out of The Stepford Wives.

He pulled up in his black Toyota Camry.

“If you can’t stay with me,” I told him, staring into the distance, “then I don’t want this. We should end it.”

He said he couldn’t.
He was bound.
By family. By religion. By fear.
If he disobeyed, he believed he would go to hell.

He came to the U.S. at sixteen.
Still carried the weight of his village back home.
Still honored their rules more than his own heart.

So I told him to go.
And he did.

He got in his car and started backing out of my driveway.
And I just watched. Frozen. Breaking inside.

My parents say I do this.
That I have a script in my head I keep trying to live out.
Maybe they’re right.

When he reached the end of the street, something in me broke.
I ran into the middle of the road.
Opened his car door.
Got in.
Begged him to stay.

“I can’t be with you forever,” he whispered.

I’ll take what I can, I told him.

And so we sat there.
In the middle of the road.
In the dark.
Crying.