Single Eyes

Dear Oyinye,

There are nights when I look at you and I cannot tell if I am looking at home or at a beautiful place I am only passing through. I keep wondering if love always comes with an expiration date folded somewhere inside it and hidden so carefully that we only find it after we've already unpacked our hearts.

I don't know why I think about endings while you're still here. Maybe because I have learned that permanence is the cruellest promise people accidentally make. Nothing ever says that it is temporary; it simply stays long enough to convince you it isn't.

Sometimes I watch you laugh, and instead of feeling safe, I feel afraid. Afraid because this exact version of you is happening only once. This Tuesday evening. This conversation. This silence between us.

Tomorrow, we'll already be different people pretending we are the same ones from yesterday.

Isn't that terrifying? That we never really love the same person twice? Every sunrise quietly change us until we become strangers wearing familiar faces.

I wonder if people who stay together for fifty years ever stop grieving the countless versions of each other they had to lose along the way.

Perhaps forever isn't built by never changing. Perhaps forever is simply agreeing to fall in love with every stranger your favorite person becomes. But what if one day you become someone who no longer recognizes the shape of my name inside your mouth? What if I wake up beside you and realize that the distance between us isn't measured in inches anymore, but in all the things we forgot to say before they became too late?

I keep asking myself a question I am too embarrassed to say out loud because it sounds like betrayal while you're kissing my forehead: are we building a life together, or are we simply becoming each other's most beautiful memory?

Maybe not every relationship is meant to survive. Maybe some people comes carrying nothing but a lesson disguised as affection. Maybe you are not the person I grow old with. Maybe you are the reason I will know how to love the person I eventually do. There is something unbearably lonely about that thought, that someone can completely rearrange your soul without ever belonging to your future.

People love saying, "If it's real, it'll last." I have never believed that, though. Some of the realest things disappear first. Childhood ends. Grandparents leave. Summer vacations become stories. The favourite shirt eventually fades after too many washes. Reality has never been measured by duration. It has always been measured by how deeply something changes you before it goes.

So maybe love doesn't fail just because it ends. Maybe endings are simply another language love happens to speak.

Still, I am selfish enough to want both. I don't want to call you my greatest lesson. I don't want to thank you for teaching me how to heal after you've become the wound. I don't want to become one of those women who smiles softly whenever someone mentions your name because enough time has passed to make heartbreak sound poetic.

I don't want to write beautifully about surviving you. I want to be too busy living beside you to write about losing you at all.

But there is this quiet ache that visits me when you're asleep next to me. What if this is all your life was supposed to borrow? What if the universe only introduced you to each other so one day you'll know exactly what you'll spend years trying to replace? It is unfair how the happiest moments are often haunted by the possibility that they are already becoming memories while we're still inside them.

Maybe that is what scares me most, that one day I'll realise the version of us I keep trying to return to no longer exists anywhere except inside my own head.

That our forever was never measured by calendars, anniversaries, or silver hair, it was measured by a handful of ordinary evenings that quietly became the standard by which I would compare the rest of my life.

So tell me, before time decides for us—before life interrupts us, before we become another story people summarise with they were good while they lasted—tell me honestly.

Are we building something that death itself will struggle to erase? Or are we simply standing inside the most beautiful moment of our lives... mistaking it for a lifetime until it slips through our hands, leaving us to spend the rest of our years wondering if forever had been there all along, only wearing the disguise of something heartbreakingly brief?

Earlier today, I looked right into your eyes when you were asked who you were to me.

You said I am a friend.

I was asked directly when our wedding is, and I said sometimes next year

I know I am all in, but your answer made it sound as if you were not too sure.

Then Brother Gbenga said, "Sister Oyinye, let your eyes be single as he was alighting from the car, and it all became very clear to me.

You are with me now, but it seems you don't have the assurance to be with me forever.

I hope I am wrong but I feel like I am right

Yours,

Daniel