Read Online Other Lives by Iman Humaydan - Free Book Online

don’t love him enough to forget that I was left hanging, always waiting to leave, and I don’t hate him enough to leave.
    This means it is over, the relationship is over!
    â€œThis means the relationship’s over…” Eva says when I tell her how I feel, as though she’s discovered something important.
    But who said anything about a lack of love or the end of the relationship? I ask her, thinking that I’m passing through something normal, like the movement of water in the ocean near my house in Mombasa, the ebb and flow of the tide. What I’m living isn’t lack of love or the relationship’s end. No… no, not at all. It’s just a perpetual, repeated, never-ending tidying up of my emotional house.
    In the beginning of my marriage to Chris, I thought that our lack of understanding was born of our two different languages, and that clarity and honesty would fix this. But I’ve discovered that my style only widens the gulf between us; my clarity ends any ambiguity about whether we might build something together and ensures that the problem isn’t misunderstanding, but an estrangement that will only increase with time and take us down a path from which there is no return.
    â€œLost in translation!”
    He always throws this cliché in my face, naively trying to lay the blame on our different languages. He’ll say it over and over, trying to find common points between us, but this expression feels like an insult to me. Whenever he says it I feel like he’s swearing at me. The problem isn’t the difference in language but a lack of language. This misunderstanding used to exhaust me but in time I surrendered to it. “Surrender” isn’t the right word. Indeed, I could almost say that misunderstanding has become a source of amusement for me, so much so that I have begun to use intentionally few words. It took a long time for me to discover the pleasure of vagueness. This discovery was accompanied by another discovery: that I need and miss the pleasure of a man who makes me laugh. When I realized this, I started laughing spontaneously, leaving Chris to guess at the reason for my laughter. I knew this would irritate him and eventually he’d give up. In the end he has gotten used to it.
    He has begun attributing my behavior to our different experiences of married life. His first marriage to a British woman and second to an Iranian woman seem to make him believe that our misunderstandings result from my lack of experience, my failure to understand marriage and relationships between couples. It’s hard to know what his marriage to a third woman who is a different age and has different experiences and a different culture than his previous two wives means to him. But I know that he doesn’t miss me when I’m traveling. And I miss so many things and live with so much loss that this fact just becomes a part of my life. I know, though, that he’ll always write me many letters. Letters that will tell me about his day and then always linger over memories we share… Like how we met for the first time in the airport, when the Australian police called him to search my father—the shrapnel lodged in my father’s head made the electronic security checkpoint beep every time my father passed through it. Chris will write to me about the second time we met, in his clinic, and how he used to visit us to follow up on my father’s health after we moved out of my uncle’s house to our own place in Adelaide.
    The first time we met, he entered the room next to the police office in the Australian airport and immediately walked up to my father and me, saying hello and apologizing for being late because of an emergency at the hospital. I no longer remember what he first said to my father when he learned that we’d arrived recently from Lebanon, but he told us that he too was born there and he knew the village of Shemlan, but that he