The disagreement started with something small, as they often do. But as the hours passed, one sharp comment led to another, and soon the air in the room was heavy with words we couldn't take back.
We eventually retreated to separate rooms, not as a punishment but to seek the space that anger needs to cool. In the quiet dark of the guest room, sleep wouldn’t come. My mind replayed the harsh tones and wounded looks, the silence amplifying every remembered word.
Then, the faint creak of the door.
He thought I was asleep. I could hear him searching for something, then pausing. I lay still, eyes closed, as he leaned close enough for me to feel his warmth.
"I wish…” he whispered into the dark, his voice soft and close. But the sentence remained unfinished. The words dissolved into a quiet, fragile space all their own before he withdrew, shutting the door softly behind him.
I was left alone with the echo of that suspended thought. *I wish…* What did he wish for? An erased argument? A gentler way? The silence wasn’t empty, though; it was filled with the quiet truth that he had come back. In the heart of our conflict, he had offered a moment of unspoken care.
The next morning, we sat with our coffee, talking about small, safe things—the rain, the day’s plans. It was a gentle bridge back to each other. Then he met my eyes and said, "I wish we could talk without hurting each other.”
I knew then that this was the end of the sentence he had begun the night before. We didn’t fix everything that morning. Some tensions lingered. But we made a choice—to keep trying, to speak more softly, to listen more closely. We remembered that love isn’t the absence of fighting, but the steady, deliberate return to each other, again and again.
