Carmen exhaled. She exhaled as if she was gathering all the remnants of those wretched words still left in her bones. She exhaled as if she was coiling them into a tight ball with angry fists. She exhaled as if she was hurling them out of her system with all the power love allowed her to feel.
“I didn’t know how to love myself,” she said quietly, the storm having calmed down and floating around like a gentle breeze now. “And there are going to be days when I’ll forget how to do so. When I might fall again, where I might crash, where I might break. But I will still love the people I love with every single fibre of my being. And nobody gets to tell me otherwise.
“Not loving myself made me unready to get involved in a relationship. Not loving myself made me slow and weary when it comes to opening up and letting people in,” —Carmen paused, then breathed— “but love exists even when you aren’t in a relationship. Love exists even when you’re struggling to spill your darkest secrets to someone else. My scars, my insecurities, my flaws—they do not determine my ability to love another heart, another soul. Just how I act on it.”
The silence that fell on the two of them in that room was like the aftermath of a hurricane: dead quiet with the shock of witnessing the violent emotions fly past in strong bursts; messy with all the anger that’d been released from the inferno inside Carmen’s heart.
Wow, Carmen mused to herself. That felt good.
She tipped her head back on the sofa and breathed in deeply, wondering how things would’ve transpired if she hadn’t let herself believe that she was incapable of loving someone just because she had dents and scratches on her being.
“What are you thinking about?” Gloria asked after a while, breaking the stunned silence that had wrapped around them.
“Alternative scenarios,” Carmen replied. “If I hadn’t let myself believe that what I felt for Asa back then wasn’t love, if I hadn’t let myself believe that I was someone too damaged to feel such a deep sense of connection to him, then maybe… maybe I wouldn’t have had to let him believe it, too. I wouldn’t have to tell him that I wasn’t in love with him, because that wasn’t true, was it? I was in no place to get into a relationship, true. But I did love him. I just let the world dictate my feelings for me.” Carmen smiled sadly, scratching the side of her nose. “It would’ve saved the two of us a lot of pain.”
Silence fell on them again, and Carmen appreciated that Gloria didn’t feel the need to comment on what she’d just shared. The never-ending possibilities of what ifs wasn’t something she wanted to navigate through, despite bringing it up occasionally.
“Gloria,” Carmen said in a quiet, serious tone after a while.
“Yes, Carmen?”
“The first month that followed Isla’s death, Asa took it really hard,” Carmen muttered, looking down at her hands again. “I think maybe a part of himself thought he was to blame, as ridiculous as that sounds. It took some time, but his parents and I eventually got through to him and made him see that sometimes you couldn’t help people, no matter how much you wanted to.” Carmen pulled in her bottom lip, lost in thought. “There’s this saying, isn’t there? About how you could bring a horse to a lake, but you couldn’t force it to drink. It’s the same way with people too, isn’t it? Because Asa’s friendship with Isla had grown rocky a long time before he met me. He tried to stick by her, but she just didn’t seem to want the help and preferred to push him away in every turn. Isla should’ve wanted it for herself to be saved in order for her to actually be saved.”
Carmen gulped, her voice beginning to tremble as she spoke the next words like each syllable was porcelain. “So… is it okay for me to—to think that it was the same case with my mother?” She leant further back into the cushions, curling in on herself like a little child. “Maybe…maybe it wasn’t completely my fault? Maybe my mother didn’t want to be saved? Maybe giving up was her choice? And…and even if I was a contributing factor towards her ending her own life, I guess I wasn’t the sole reason, right?
“I spent nights by Asa’s side telling him how Isla’s death wasn’t something he could have ever foreseen. And I’m beginning to wonder if the same words I’d comforted him with are the words I need to be telling myself each time I laid the blame on me for mum.”
Carmen was always painting Asa in shades of gold and plucking out the thorns from Hunter’s being. And maybe, just maybe, it was okay if she could give some of that love that she showered everyone else with towards herself, too.
•••
Late September
Carmen had officially met Asa’s parents around a month back, at a fancy little family restaurant for dinner, much to Mrs. San Román’s dismay that the first time she was meeting the love of her son’s life was at a place where she couldn’t exhibit her fine culinary skills. She had assured her that it was fine, that Mrs. San Román could cook for her some
