Enough
19. Lie. She asked the right question. I was answering mine.
She asked if I loved her.
I said yes. That was true.
What she meant was: is this love going to become something? Can it hold the image of a future — the kind you can show people, the kind with a direction?
I answered the feeling. Not because I was dishonest. Because it was the only thing I knew with certainty.
The lie is not in the yes.
The lie is in what we mean by it. The way we use it to mean a feeling and also a commitment and also a capacity — as if these three things arrive at the same time. As if wanting to build is the same as being built enough to do it.
I loved Karen. That was true. I was not ready to build anything. That was also true. And I had told myself for years that these were the same thing — that if the love was real, the readiness would come. That the sincerity of the feeling was enough to close the distance between who I was and what the love required.
It isn’t.
Love arrives before you are. The preparation is separate work. It takes whatever time it takes and it cannot be hurried by how much you mean it.
I know this now because I had to leave. Not her specifically. The shape I was living in, which had stopped fitting. The leaving wasn’t proof the love was insufficient. It was proof I had further to go.
She said she didn’t know if it was enough.
She was asking the right question.
I was answering mine.