This morning I wake in panicked escape from a claustrophobic bedroom with a million Samans pressing in, one after another, a train of hairy flesh forcing its way between my legs and making the bed creak with five years of misery. The memories are a cold womb of pain inside me, a place I never wanted to go and hate hate hate to return. Everything falls apart in that place, starting with me. In our marriage all my pretensions of human connection and fulfillment were stripped away, leaving only a lonely resigned emptiness that will never stop if I give in to it again…

“Nick,” I cry out weakly, and grope through a tangle of sheets toward him — but he’s gone. Long gone. All the warmth has leached from his side of the bed.

Instead I find a piece of notebook paper. In the middle of the page is his fastidious scrawl. Went to get breakfast. Be right back. There’s no signature underneath, but he did write down a time — 9:53 AM.

I glance at the oversized digits on my runner’s watch. 10:17 AM. I’m not sure I’ve ever slept this late in my life before.

I read and reread and re-reread the note, treasuring its brevity. Yeah, maybe it would’ve been nice if he signed it XXXs and OOOs or Love, Nick or something. But his primary concern when he was pausing halfway out the hotel room door — he didn’t want me to worry. Because I’m a girl who worries like the worst Iranian mom. And he knows that. He knows me.

Then I realize that duh, the piece of notebook paper must originate with one of my notebooks. I roll onto my elbow and idly consider my backpack, lying on cracked tiles in a corner, unzipped and spilling contents from its side. Maybe Nick grabbed the first notebook he found, the one I use to record my impressions of Mexico and practice my sketching.

Or maybe he kept digging and discovered my top-secret notebook, hidden by nothing except its placement at the bottom of the backpack. Those are the pages I fill and fill like a bottomless hole, pouring my heart in between the lines. Poems woven from raw emotion. Feverish run-on sentences that span pages. Sometimes a list starring him, like “Places I want to go with Nick”, or my name written Nooshin Roberts. The open veins of my hopes and dreams.

Suddenly inspired, I turn over his note and grab a pen and start scribbling on the blank side:

sunlight is
crashing into the windowpane
every dusty glint
a vision of something
I can’t quite discern
and maybe this isn’t
love yet
but I can yearn

I want to write more, but the pen freezes in my hand. Forget yearning. I love him. Omigod, it’s true. It’s so…so…TRUE. And I think — think — he loves me too. But…

The emotion rips like tissue paper.

Nick dispenses with the vocabulary of affection, probably because “love” is what his parents did to him in its name. I’m fleeing a synonym for marital submission, a series of prohibitive imperatives — never disagree with your husband in public, never anger his family, never burn the rice.

I want the word to be a giddy movie starring us, but it’s not. It’s just not. And that’s okay, because actions speak louder than a single stupid word anyway. We’re together in Mexico, and his arctic gaze melts a little when he looks my way, and our conversations are endless wandering things, and starry eternities pass while he’s inside me.

Speaking of eternities, I check my watch again. 10:42 AM. That doesn’t exactly qualify as right back. Hmmm.

I flop onto my back and stare up at the ceiling, a whitewashed concrete expanse interrupted by a latticework of tiny cracks and nothing else. The single light fixture is mounted on a wall instead. Nick’s voice is an echo in my head, rehashing the emergency drill in case of his disappearance:

  1. call the US Consulate General in Tijuana, a number he programmed into my cellphone’s speed dial
  2. call Professor Emeritus Hercules Gutierrez, another number programmed into my speed dial
  3. call his friend Juan Angel Santelana, yet another speed dial number
  4. grab our stuff, get the spare keys to the Explorer out of the suitcase, and immediately drive back to Tijuana — or take a bus or even plane, if Nick disappeared with the truck
  5. only worry about him after I’m back in our house, safe and sound

The doorknob begins to rattle. I’m not worried because a muffled voice is calling “Hey Nooshball, it’s me…” through the thick lacquered wood. Another of his security precautions. If I can’t tell it’s him, I’m supposed to barricade the door and yell for help.

Nick arrives in a burst of action — whirling into the room, locking the door behind him, grinning “Hey sleepyhead!”, tossing a paper bag onto the bed next to me, stripping off his corduroy jacket, saying “I got us mangoes and corn tortillas and Diet Cokes,” preening in the bureau mirror.

I pull up the sheets to my clavicles and explore the paper bag. Hunger erupts within me. The tortillas are warm and fragrant, and the mangoes — an Old World fruit carried by the conquistadores — are mouthwateringly yellow, the color of ripeness.

He dents the bed next to my hip, settling himself with a boot still touching the tile. “Sorry it took so long. I’m the first gringo they’ve had in this town in years. Everybody and their dog came out to meet me.” His shoulders are moving in a sour roll beneath his chambray shirt. “What was I supposed to do, really? I had to be polite, make some smalltalk, that kind of thing.” Then he leans down to give me a quick peck on the forehead.

Beneath him I’m in a different world. I murmur “Buenos dias” and flare with desire and twist to intercept his lips with mine.

Nick recoils, gasping and wincing and laughing. “Are you trying to fucking kill me? Go brush your teeth, girl!”

Morning breath kisses — don’t let them happen to your relationship.