Missing Piece

Some letters had been particularly difficult for him like the one in which Liza had written about the time they had confessed love for each other. He still remembered clearly, they had been attending their friend’s wedding and Liza was going on and on about how beautiful it was to be tied in the bond of marriage and how lucky their friends were to find true love when he had suddenly blurted out ‘ I love you ‘.

As soon as he realized the words he had said he had flushed red. Liza had looked at him with wide eyes before smiling softly and saying “I know, I have known it for a long time”. Then she had once again turned towards the couple. “You didn’t say it back” he had said and she had replied with a chuckle “Love, I have said this to you every day. Every time we say goodbye and you have said it back to me every single time”. He had then realized that for the past seven months he had been telling her ‘I Love you’ every day and she had been saying it back every time. He had become so used to telling her ‘I love you’ in his mind that he didn’t even realize when he had started saying it out loud.

Jonathan couldn’t describe what he felt for Liza in words. She had changed his life, made him happier, and most importantly completed him. Sure it seemed so cheesy to say those lines but there are moments in your life which you never want to forgive and then there are some moments that you won’t be able to forget even if you want to. His life was now defined by two moments like that.

The first moment was when he had said ‘I love you' to Liza consciously and she had said it back. It had been the most wonderful feeling in the world. He felt as if his heart had expanded and was trying to outrun a horse and yet somehow he had felt peace in his mind. He felt As if he had finally found that missing piece of his jigsaw puzzle. Realizing that you loved someone so much that you would follow them absolutely anywhere was both nerve-wracking and exhilarating at the same time. It was like handing over a loaded gun to someone else and leaving your life at their mercy. He still remembered the goosebumps which had erupted all over his skin when he had blurted out the ‘I love you’ at the wedding. That moment the look of shock and adoration in Liza’s eyes would forever be pained in his mind with all the bright hues that Liza had brought with her and then there was the moment when he finally realized that Liza had cheated on him. All the bright hues had turned grey, leaving him stranded away from all those good memories. He had never thought of himself as someone who could break easily and yet he had felt like he would break with one more slight blow and that blow came when he demanded divorce and Liza signed them without a single protest, without even trying to explain herself as if she had accepted it long before it had happened.

The thought had unsettled him. Was it his fault? Had he neglected Liza so much that she had turned to someone else for the love he was supposed to give her? Or had she come to know of the sins he had committed? But still, did it give Liza the right to betray him, to break him? All the thoughts were swirling around him, all the images of Liza were taunting him, threatening to swallow him into the pit of never-ending sadness.

Jonathan was clutching the letter in his hand when his cell phone rang bringing his turmoil to an end and shocking him. He cursed the human race for creating annoying cell phones and picked it up. “What?” he barked to the person on the other side of the phone. He was angry that the person had disturbed him and had brought him out from his happy memories, from his sweet reprieve only to expose him to harsh reality. “ Jonathan, I swear - I swear I tried to protect her, I told her not to go, I told her that she was not in the correct to state of mind I, I tried Jonathan I really did” sobbed Alice, her voice was hysterical and rough. She was crying and stumbling through the words so badly that he could hardly grasp them. Had it not been the desperateness in her voice or the fact that she was crying he would have snapped at her, he was still angry at her for telling that he was at fault, not Liza. But something in her voice stopped him, and dread filled his veins

“What happened Alice? Why are you crying?” he asked his voice was laced with panic, his mind was jumping to hundreds of terrible conclusions, the worst possible scenarios but what he heard next, had never even occurred to his mind because for him it was just not a possibility and though he was supposed to hate her he could not help but let out a cry of pain that filled his whole being as he heard the words “Liza was in an accident.”