“Do you love me?”
Like water dripping from a million-year-old stalactite in a languid frequency, her words donged against my tympanic membrane with a cavernous echo. I was in a trance gifted by an antidepressant taken after a late dinner when I was shaken up by the question, “Do you love me?” I continued to lay in bed weighed down by the enormity and ungodly timing of the query. And the clarity it needed.
I initially thought the question was whisked up by some nightmare she had just experienced. But that wasn’t the case as I could see her tearing eyes in the streetlight peering through the window. Which meant she had not been sleeping all along but pondering over love, life and what not. The feline glow in her looks meant she had been hungry for an answer. I started to rummage through all the pockets of my cognition to deliver a quick reply.
More than an answer, what bothered me was the context. Why did the question come to batter her now after 42 years of togetherness? Ever since we entered the alliance at the age of 22, we had fought many world wars, on issues as trivial as cooking, making the bed, scrubbing toilets, stealing the last sip of the laban drink to topics as grave as the ownership of gold bought with my cards, my socialising which was misconstrued as soft flirting or even philandering.
As in the end of every conflict, we lackadaisically signed on dozens of accords that a baby bloomer could think of — Magna Carta, Camp David and Ozlo — and were cheered on by our children who used such celebrations to fill their shopping cart surreptitiously, like in the geopolitics of oil and gas.
Such treaties revitalised our family bonds, until their building blocks crashed the soonest like a pack of cards, knocked down by a barrage of topics that were of least interest to the family. It was a cycle of love and hate as crazy as it can get. We were like two superpowers perennially threatening to launch their ballistic missiles at each other, and then happy to shake hands at an exotic retreat. Call it love diplomacy.
Around the same time the Covid pandemic brought the planet down to earth, she talked about her knee ache, head resting on my shoulder while the sun drowned off an empty Ajman beach, and I nudged the last empty bottles into the surf.
“My tennis elbow is worse than that,” I replied.
“Who told you to play table tennis? Learn to mind your age.”
“Who told you to walk for two hours? You aren’t young either.”
“Watch the sunset instead of picking mistakes,” I whispered over the howling wind.
“You always said sunsets are painful,” she argued. “Let’s stare the setting sun in its eyes. Practise it.”
Fast-forward to the days when rents in Dubai more than doubled. We both grew stoic as truth finally sunk in the sea of conscientiousness. Egos died a sudden death as we leafed through new chapters of love, life and tonnes of medical journals — not necessarily in that order. On the weekends, our CX7 found its way to clinics instead of our favourite breakfast joint. Pills of different hues replaced cosmetics and utility bills in the sling bags we both carried.
I held her hands in a clutch of assurance as we combed the city as part of the reminiscence therapy.
“How many times did I tell you pass some orange juice?” she said this morning.
“I did, and you drank, too, darling.”
“Oops, I forgot.”
After which I arranged her pill organiser, folded the laundry, made her a drink and played Leona Lewis’s Bleeding Love to reassure her soul and senses.
Wasn’t I a caring husband? Did I miss anything that she had wished for? What was such an enormous deficiency on my part that prompted her to wonder if I still loved her?
“You remember the love letters you wrote to me in the 80s? Back in the day, you were so passionate,” she recollected.
“I still am. It’s just that I’m more concerned about your health and physical comfort.”
“You are my partner, not a home nurse.”
“Love is caring, isn’t it?”
“To care is one of several elements that sum up the meaning of love, darling. When was the last time you ran your fingers through my hair? You never did ever since my meningioma surgery. The doctors have left a Sheikh Zayed Road under my thin hair. I need a hair treatment to camouflage the surgical boulevard. Remember, you proposed to me saying you are in love with my knee-long hair.”
“Darling, your health is more important.”
“My happiness? What about that? Did you answer my question, do you still love me?”
“I did answer, no? Just a while ago.”
“Oh, you did? Oops, I forgot.”