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Nia: first love
“I thought I could be all right with just loving you,” Nia said. It was evening, and the two of them were seated in the gardens on the painted bench beside the allyear blooms — the very same bench where they had met up for their first date. The colors of the bench were muted, in this light. Nia looked at Ayda, her eyes dark, bright, welling.
This conversation was in sequel to one they’d had a month ago. Perhaps Ayda should not have said what she had said, then. Perhaps her words had been cold. The things she said had certainly chilled Nia’s heart.
But Ayda had been taught that open and honest communication was crucial to close relationships. Thus she had stated her cruel observation, the closest thing to truth that she could give. She had searched her own heart, picking out a painful needlepoint embroidery from nebulous emotions, wants, needs, uncertainties, and she had given that embroidery to Nia, because Nia deserved to know.
A month ago, Ayda had told Nia, “I think you love me more than I can love you back.”
And Nia had been so quiet. Nia had responded, “I think so too, but it still hurts to hear you say it.”
Ayda’s own feelings regarding Nia were difficult to card through and understand. She wanted Nia, she did. She loved Nia’s cutting humor, her adventuresomeness, her companionship.
But there was something that prickled beneath Ayda’s skin as they held hands at the park. There was an unease that sank its teeth into Ayda’s flesh when Nia kissed her. There was no quantifiable reason why there should be anything wrong except… when Nia smiled radiant and murmured “I love you,” those words touched Ayda like ice, and the echo tasted like acrid guilt on her tongue when she replied, “I love you, too.”
It wasn’t a lie, was it? Ayda loved Nia. She did.
She did.
This must be what love is. What else could it be? But…
Ayda did not love Nia enough. Or not in the right way. Something was not quite right between them, not natural or easy, not balanced, no matter how much Ayda willed it so. It felt, at times, as if Ayda was performing a caricature of herself. She watched herself walk with Nia as if they were both actors on a scripted stage.
And now it was evening, on the painted bench where they had met for their first date, beside the allyear blooms, and Nia repeated, “I thought if you would be okay with me loving you in my way, and you could love me however you could in your way, that it could be enough.”
But.
Here, the great gaping gap between the words just spoken and the words that haven’t yet come, and Ayda watched Nia’s mouth work around the words, and Ayda prayed that whatever came next would free her from the uneasy pretense of it all.
“But it’s not,” Nia said.
They broke up.
And distantly, logically, Ayda knew this should crush her. It did crush her, but in a way that didn’t quite make sense — not in the usual way, though she couldn’t say why not. She went home and cried behind the lili tree, crying out feelings that she would not be able to untangle until years later. But beyond the grief, the disappointment, the loss of one of her closest friends (too awkward, after all that, to stay connected on any axis; there were too many shredded feelings), beyond all those tears of grief were tears of relief.
Farai: first wife
Farai sat on the porch rocker, with Tano’s sleeping head laid across her lap. Ayda sat next to them, watching how Farai wove a finger through Tano’s curls over and over. The rocker creaked whenever one of them shifted their weight.
“It isn’t so much that you wear your heart on your sleeve. It’s that your heart is visible in a museum display case, untouchable,” Farai said, half smiling to herself.
It was such a cutting observation that it took Ayda a moment to catch her breath.
Ayda had used the word, just once, in Farai’s earshot — “aromantic” — which was a word that was at once damning and freeing, a curse and a blessing, one that she had only recently begun to wear in the privacy of her mind. It seemed trite, almost, to package something so intimately discarnate as Ayda’s hangups about relationships, commitment, love, duty, kindness, into a single esoteric word coined within an obscure schema of human social relationships. And yet the shape of it felt right, in the way that so many of these complicated things often didn’t.
“Are you trying to touch my heart?” Ayda asked, with a practiced, wry smile. But beneath the gentle, friendly, glass-case-facade laid that old unease of something that is not quite right.
On some level she was prepared to mourn this perfectly imperfect thing she shared with Farai and Tano. The past year with them was as close as Ayda has ever managed to achieve of that untouchable platonic ideal — some kind of relationship to stave off the loneliness, some kind of relationship for mutual support and care, because how will you make it though life alone, Ayda? Humans are social creatures, are they not? Is that not our greatest strength, your greatest strength, to knit the gaps between people and make them harmonize, to braid a singular whole that is much stronger than the individual threads?
Ayda was yet uncertain that any kind of relationship could ever suit her. It was difficult to say if it was something she truly wanted, as opposed to something she felt she ought to want; as if participating in some kind of relationship could serve proof of concept for the human condition. At times it seemed that some kind of relationship was requisite for her family, friends, and society to recognize Ayda as a fully realized mature adult with emotional intelligence and a stalwart network of social support.
To be in some kind of relationship was proof of belonging, on the private scale as well as public.
As someone who worked for the public and labored for the intimate interconnected machinery of society, Ayda knew just how crucial such immaterial things as appearances and awards could be.
She often wondered to herself, in the privacy of her own glass-cased heart: why did she need others? Why was it requisite to share that inner solitary silence of herself? Why should the fact that she did not and would not love anyone count against her? Why was duty and community-building not genuine and true unless it was built from foundations of love? Why was love, made narrow and exclusive to select beneficiaries, not considered a selective selfishness?
Why was she not a fully realized person unless she was participant in some kind of relationship?
All benefit of appearances aside, being with Farai and Tano was… nice, in the simple ways. Logistical ways. Breakfasts made, hands clasped. Laughter and songs, stories and shoulders leaned on. So she kept being with them. She would be sorry to break their hearts by not dancing this dance correctly, in that widely approved real, meaningful, loving way.
“Not unless you want me to,” Farai said. Farai looked up, met Ayda’s gaze for a moment. Her eyes were deep and clear, infinite dark and infinite unknowns. They’d known each other long enough by now that Ayda was beginning to decode those unknowns, but the vast worlds of Farai’s heart were still largely opaque to her. “But I’m happy just to see you.”
Ayda found herself wordless, caught in a slow flush of some kind of unidentified feeling that was not love, or maybe was, or maybe didn’t need to be. Should this feel not-right, the way things often took an invisible turn for the worse during conversations such as these? But the not-rightness wasn’t happening this time. It was… fine. Possibly more than fine. The sparkling unfamiliarity of it was strange.
Farai smiled, a little crookedly in that endearing way of hers. “I know you are too busy trying to take over the Alliance as a unilateral dictator to bother with such little things—”
“I am not,” Ayda laughed. It was an old tease.
“—but Tano and I were wondering, perhaps you’d like to move in with us? For the times when you’re in town to take a rest from your lordship, at least.”
Ayda’s breath almost caught, again. Farai had that uncanny ability to knock her off balance. A thousand calculations passed unseen through Ayda’s heart and mind, but she found herself saying, lightly, as if watching a ghost act through her body, “Haven’t I already?”
“Functionally, I’d say so,” Farai said, crooked smile broadening. “But if we move you properly from the ‘frequent guest’ category to ‘frequent resident’ category, we can put you on the official roster to de-grit the gutters.”
Tano surfaced from sleep enough to grunt agreement, and Ayda laughed a quiet laugh, marveling at the complexities made simple.
Murderbot: first guard
SecUnit and Ayda were sitting in the dark, the two of them in adjacent fiberweave outdoor chairs, away from the rabble and revelry of the festival. Ayda was still forcing her breathing steady, counting slow, shaking off the tension of the crowded party and Thiago’s needling. Despite the leisurely length of the go-cart ride away from the festival, her heart still felt trembled, her nerves wired tight.
SecUnit spoke to her, uncharacteristically asking after her well being. So it must have been obvious how unbalanced she was.
Ayda could not escape the care and concern of those around her — not even SecUnit now, for all its famous reluctance to discuss mushy things like this. The fact that it was broaching this topic, showing overt concern—
Ayda had promised herself that she would not make assumptions of SecUnit’s wants and needs. But it was difficult for her to restrain herself from making observations, forecasts, and hypotheses. It was her long-honed skillset, to predict and maneuver through the needs and desires of others.
So long as she did not act on those predictions too overtly, perhaps she could forgive herself the human impulse to anticipate and fulfill the desires of someone she cared for, someone she had a duty to.
(In a moment of weakness, Ayda admits to herself that some of those long-reviled relationship expectations might have been a helpful for her here, had any existed at all. But none do. She must chart this on her own, using only the broadest policies of honesty, care, consideration.
Perhaps one day SecUnit would be family to her, in its own way. Perhaps not. Perhaps they could only figure out together what it meant, when Ayda said “it is my SecUnit,” and SecUnit said, “she is my client.” (Even just that felt like too much, even if it was true — the ownership implied by the words “my SecUnit.”))
The shadows were deep, where they sat now. The lights and sounds of the festival were distant and muffled by the sound barriers. SecUnit’s presence beside her was dark, soothing, even as it quietly voiced its concerns to her, suggested that she take a trauma treatment.
How tired Ayda was of being reminded of the trauma treatment she needed. There just wasn’t any time for it right now. She could get along for the moment without it.
One moment after the next, ad infinitum.
Besides, she could deflect.
Ayda reminded it of the survey that it hadn’t yet committed to—
She said to it, “And you know Amena and Thiago are going, too. I’ll feel better if you’re there to keep an eye on them.”
It asked, a touch skeptical, “What about you?”
She opened her mouth. She wanted to tell SecUnit that she would be perfectly fine while it was gone on the survey. She wanted to be fine. But with her heart still tremoring even now, she could not successfully deceive herself of her own frailties. If she could not believe it herself, she could not outright lie to SecUnit either.
Her mouth open, the shape of a lie crouched smooth on her tongue.
However much Ayda wanted to keep SecUnit close — there was the physical safety of its presence as well as psychological safety she experienced when it was with her — she could not continue to lean on it like this.
This was not only her pride and independent streak speaking, nor her tendency to hold people at a cautionary, professional arm’s length. If they continued as they were, with her depending on its constant attendance to her sense of security, she feared they could end up as something not quite right, resentments and codependency building to a simmering point of some kind of relationship that neither of them wanted. It wasn’t fair for her to keep SecUnit at her beck and call as a sort of safety blanket.
For so long, Ayda had been wary to reach out for human intimacy for fear of mismatched expectations and uncertainties about the shape of her own heart. She somehow did not have this fear with SecUnit, perhaps thanks to the complications baked into the stiff, mildly awkward, unformulaic structure of how they had come about knowing each other. The expectations were none. The relationship unprecedented. They could only be what they actively made of it, could only declare it for themselves. What a terrifying, freeing thing.
So instead of holding back she found herself reaching for SecUnit, for its time, for its reassurance, for its hand, as if she were possessed by some spirit of a starving, frightened thing. Is this how it was, for other people? Ayda didn’t want this insecurity of hers to become an imposition. She needed to think and feel with a clear head and heart again, before they could have any hope of moving forward.
And she found that she did want them to move forward.
So she said, into the shadows of the trees, with SecUnit an unseen comforting presence seated beside her, “I hate feeling so weak. I just need to stop. And I need to stop leaning on you. It’s not fair to you. We need to be apart so I can … stand on my own feet again.”
The pause was protracted, and for a moment her heart dropped at some untargeted fear of ruin.
Then SecUnit said, in a smiling voice, “It’s not me, it’s you.”
Ayda huffed a laugh.
SecUnit added, decisive, “Fine, I’ll go on the survey.”
Ayda blinked. Its agreement was so abrupt, startling after all the evasive waffling and vague procrastination about the survey that had stretched out until this moment.
But SecUnit continued, “—If you agree to take a trauma treatment.”
Ayda felt those threads of social support and caretaking enshroud her, a trap tightening. But gently, as if she were a child being stuffed into a warm coat before being sent out into the cold.
She almost told SecUnit that they might make a politician of it yet— but kept the thought to herself, for now.