Not As Giants Love

Short story, ~2000 words

A week ago, when I asked you if you still loved me, I thought the most painful thing you could’ve said was no. I don’t know if you remember, but when you said “Of course I still love you” and asked if I still loved you, I started to step forward as I said that I did. I thought it was the moment of reunion. I thought I was about to hold you again.

I don’t think I can express how I felt when you said “I don’t believe you.”

Well, you know what came next. I tried a torrent of words to convince you of my feelings, all of them useless. I didn’t reach you. You said you needed to sleep.

I stayed up another three hours after you went to sleep. That night was the worst one. I couldn’t have imagined how quickly my resentment would grow.

You wanted too much, I thought. You wanted a love more steady, more sure, than I could ever provide. This is real life, and people are imperfect, and I was trying, after all, and it’s not like you never hurt me. By the time I finally accepted that I needed to rest, I was furious. It’s for the best you pretended to be asleep when I went to bed.

I calmed down a bit after that, but for days all I could think of was how I could prove it to you. I dreamed up exotic vacations, perused expensive gifts, tried to think of a promise I could make to you that would convince you of my conviction. Every idea felt somehow both too grandiose and not good enough. The promises felt melodramatic, because both of us have learned through bitter experience that my words don’t always survive being put to the test. I was afraid nothing I could say would give you solace. I thought you were demanding perfection, and I knew myself better than to believe I wouldn’t fail again.

You started going to bed early, and I started staying up late, writing the first two iterations of what would become this letter. The first was angry, and the second was a plea, begging you to please, please just accept me, flawed as I am.

I told myself that Lucille wouldn’t notice anything out of the ordinary, that she was just a teenager, but the way she forced conversations at dinner and started making a point to go out with her friends in the evenings left me with little doubt that she could see more than we’d wanted her to. I can’t fault her for trying to spend time away from home. She was terrified and didn’t know what to do.

I felt the same way.

It hurt, though, that she retreated. It hurt that she found solace with her friends and not her father. It hurt that she talked to you about it and not me—I know she did, and I’m glad one of us could support her, because I’m sure she needed it, but it still hurt.

It’s pathetic, but I found myself wishing for a catastrophe, some great threat, some common enemy. I played out elaborate fantasies of what we’d do if we found out Lucille secretly had an abusive boyfriend or something, or if there were some kind of natural disaster. Suddenly, everything would become clear. You wouldn’t doubt my love then, if I just had the chance to show it.

For days, I couldn’t stop thinking about scenarios like that, where you’d need a husband and Lucille would need a father. So many stories about fathers place their families in danger—now I understand why. Those stories are outlets for the desperate care that thrashes within us. In that moment, I felt I could not express that extraordinary care without correspondingly extraordinary circumstances. I begged for a storm so I could protect you from its winds.

Love, I called it. Love, that surge of yearning fondness that I choke on when I think of you, when I think of the life we have built together, when I think of Lucille growing up and us growing old together.

I spent days in a tumble-dryer of self-righteousness. If only she knew, I thought, then she wouldn’t be so dismissive. If she knew the fervor with which I burned, the overwhelming self-sacrifice of my imagination, she would never doubt.

I wanted that fervor to be love. I wanted it to be enough.

Then, two evenings ago, in the midst of these heroic fantasies, I walked past the dishwasher—clean and ready to be emptied—and I barely even noticed. Some part of me knew you’d take care of it in the morning.

I was dimly aware that something was strange about that sequence of events, something was wrong, and then a little thought scurried through my mind, the kind of thought that seems insignificant until you pick it up to examine it and suddenly you can’t think of anything else: who was I kidding?

Who was I kidding—I’d take a bullet for you? I wouldn’t even take out the trash for you. What kind of love was I offering, where in my mind I crossed oceans to remain by your side, but here you were, right next to me, and I was letting you slip away?

I could imagine myself facing down torture and death for you, but the story always ended with you apologizing to me. I told myself stories where I was larger than life so I wouldn’t have to face my feelings of being weak, mistrusted, and insufficient. I could not bear to see myself as the flimsy thing I am.

Gradually, painfully, I came to see what I’d been doing. I tried to tell myself that I hadn’t changed, that I was still just as committed to our relationship as ever, but it was only half true. I hadn’t changed, not exactly. I had…eroded.

How?

When people ask me when I knew that I was in love with you, I never know what to tell them, so I tell them when the first domino fell and set in motion all that followed. On our fourth date, there was this moment when you’d rushed ahead to beat me to the glade, and you turned to look back at me, excited and a little nervous, like you weren’t completely sure that I was coming. A little piece of my chest lurched towards you, and it never fell back into place. I knew I never wanted you to look behind you and not see me following.

From then on, that was what I thought of when I thought of you. You were that golden girl, framed by sunlight and joy, with your nervous smile and the slight bounce in your step and the lurch in my chest.

And even now, sometimes, you’ll make that nervous smile, and it all comes flooding back—the feelings, the vows, and I’m reminded of why I chose this in the first place.

But sometimes, you’re not smiling like that. Sometimes you’re forgetting to clean your shoes when you come back in from the garden, or you’re trying too hard to be upbeat when I’m down, or you’re going all quiet, shutting me out when I’m trying to talk.

And it’s not just you. I would’ve said I loved Lucille as soon as we found out you were pregnant, but it was all so academic at that point. I didn’t really get it until she was two weeks old and you were asleep and I was holding her, and I looked at her and she just stared at me and I couldn’t look away. Your eyes. My little golden girl, who needed me to look after her, clothe her in diapers until she could clothe herself in sunlight and joy like you. And a minute later, she was screaming bloody murder and a month later I was cleaning up a blown-out diaper and a decade and a half later she was giving me one of her lectures about what would be fair and I was about ready to throttle her—

and when I was tired or annoyed or just sad, I started to play this horrible little eroding game.

In the game, I’m a giant. In the game, I’m married to another giant, the golden girl, and we have a giant child, Lucille, the baby staring at me with the golden girl’s eyes.

You and Lucille aren’t giants. You’re life-sized, and I didn’t say my vows to you, I said them to a giant clothed in sunlight. In the game, my daughter is a giant with piercing eyes, not a sarcastic teenager who speaks with certainty about societal systems she has not even experienced, let alone understood.

Every once in a while, something happens—maybe Lucille is curled up reading comics on the couch with the blanket wrapped around her and her nose is all scrunched up from laughter and suddenly she’s that child again, the magic of the moment grows her to colossal proportions and she’s my beloved baby girl. Sometimes you say just the right thing or the light catches you just right and you are the golden giant once more, and I love you, and everything is as it should be.

In the game, I’m the perfect husband, because whenever I am with my rightful giant family, I treat them with all the tender love they deserve. As for you and Lucille as you really are, human-sized, well, that’s not really my responsibility. The rules of my game say I don’t have to love you until I catch another glimpse of the best of you.

It hurt to come to those conclusions. It hurt to accept what I had been doing, and when I saw how I’d been treating you, I felt pathetic. I shrank back into myself, and everything I did became this tragic demonstration of just how horribly unworthy of you I was.

It took a while to recognize that my whole self-loathing performance was simply a dark reflection of the same problem. If I am perfect, I am not required to change; if I am worthless, fundamentally flawed beyond salvage, then I am not capable of change. The darkest depths of self-hatred, miserable as they were, were little more than an avoidance pattern. I only hated myself and deemed myself unworthy because it was easier than the terrifying alternative—that I had always been capable of loving you, but I just hadn’t.

I’m afraid that it’ll be too hard to love you like you deserve. That I’ll struggle and fall short and there will be nothing left for us. But I’m even more afraid that it’ll be easy, and that you’ll have suffered for years because I let myself pretend that love was nothing more than holding a ball of longing in my chest.

I’m sorry.

I emptied the dishwasher. I cleaned up the office like I said I would, and mopped the floor for good measure. I paid some bills, did some laundry. I bought you flowers.

Small things, I know. But perhaps that’s for the best. Small things are beneath the attention of giants. Giants love in grand gestures, in scenes from my martyr fantasies: they rescue their daughters from madmen while the cameras roll, they carry their loved ones across war zones.

But giants aren’t real. Even the greatest among us live human lives, and are made gargantuan later by history and narrative. We are not giants, we only pretend to be. We ‘love’ by trying to wave away the clouds, imagining they will disperse, imagining we have saved our loved ones from the rain. We ‘love’ by wasting our lives away, awaiting a suitably giant moment. In the unlikely event that such a moment arrives, we are humbled, not vindicated.

So I was wrong when I said that chores were small things. I thought emptying the dishwasher was a small way to express my love, but I was the perfect size for it—small enough to handle the utensils, big enough to reach the cupboards—so it wasn’t small at all.

They say that life is about the little things, but I don’t believe that anymore. Quiet moments of joy and beauty aren’t small, either, they’re human-sized. Maybe the things that matter only seem little because we’ve convinced ourselves that we are titans.

After I bought the flowers, I talked with Lucille about her difficulties at school. It went much better than usual. I want to believe that means something.

If you’re willing, I’d like to talk with you, too.