Amber Lights
There is a particular kind of night that belongs only to new love. The kind spent learning each other with no idea what harder lessons might cost.
Most of these nights we spent in his car. Parked under amber light in places that had long gone quiet, we would talk the way people talk when they've decided to trust each other. We talked about heartbreak, how it rewired us. About grief and love, and the specific shape of the lives we were each building. I told him the things I don't tell most, tracing my tender scars, as he held out his own. And then we’d lean over the center console, and hold each other in silence, bargaining the hours till morning.
Perhaps, he’d make an absurd joke that, on more than one occasion, would make me laugh until I cried. In the same night, in the same small space, we could hold something heavy together and then dissolve completely. Acting like absolute children, we’d imitate bird mating calls and collapse into each other's laps; grateful we had no witnesses, but also not really caring either way.
It felt like a dream state. The kind where the usual rules about what you're allowed to say or feel, don't quite apply. I don't know if it was the car or the light or the lateness of the hour. I think it was him. Either way, I knew it was something rare.
Later, for weeks, I argued internally with the word he used to end things. Incompatible. We could talk for hours about anything. It seemed we had the same compass, pointed at the same kind of life. We were not incompatible in values, or in laughter, or in the specific frequency at which we understood the world.
But there is a different kind of compatibility. The kind you don't discover in a parked car under amber light. The kind that only reveals itself when something goes wrong. And something will always go wrong.
We were incompatible the way two people are when they haven't yet learned how to take care of each other. How to reach for the other in the dark without startling them or how to be reached for without flinching. But I’m unsure if that was a flaw in fit, or the nature of it.
Nobody arrives already knowing the intricacies of another’s world. How could they? Every person is engraved by the love that held them and the love that didn't, and by the moments that taught them to reach out and the ones that taught them to go quiet. I believe that’s where you do the work old couples, still madly in love, talk about. The slow, patient study of another person. Nothing great skips that part. Not even with the right one.
I wonder if he believed otherwise. That love, done right, shouldn't require having to say, “this is how I break, and this is how I mend.”
Maybe that's where we were always going to diverge.
Because here I am, no longer in a parked car under amber light, but alone, driving home, asking the dashboard, “how did you break, and how do you mend?”