Better Unknown

I don’t wanna know

Photo from Pinterest

I heard her phone buzz at 1:47 in the morning, and I did not look at it. This is the part nobody believes when I tell it later that I was awake. That I felt the vibration travel through the mattress like something alive, and I kept my eyes closed and my breathing slow and even pretending to sleep. She got up quietly. Careful with the door. Careful with her voice, low and clipped, somewhere past the hallway where she thought distance was the same thing as privacy. I lay there counting the seconds she was gone, and somewhere around forty I made a decision that would define the next six months of my life: I decided not to ask. Not because I trusted her. Because I didn’t want the answer enough to risk getting it.

There’s a particular kind of intelligence that develops in a person who suspects something and refuses to confirm it. You start reading rooms instead of words. You notice when a phone is angled a certain way, when a name disappears from a lock screen,even when perfume arrives home different from the one that left. You become fluent in a language you never asked to learn, and you tell yourself fluency is paranoia, because the alternative is believing your own eyes. I became excellent at not knowing. I built a whole structure around it, deceiving myself with reasons like she was tired, reasons her phone needed a password now, reasons the laugh I heard through the wall during a "work call" sounded the way laughs sound when something is funny, not flirtatious. I was a generous architect of explanations. I gave her every benefit I had. What I never gave myself was the question. Because here’s the thing about not wanting to know… .. it isn’t cowardice, not exactly, though it wears cowardice’s clothes. It’s a kind of bargaining. If I don’t ask, nothing has technically happened. If I don’t open the phone, there’s nothing in it. The not-knowing becomes a room you can still live in, furnished with the version of your life you’d rather keep. Knowing is a door, and behind it is a different apartment entirely. So you don’t open the door. You sit very still in the room you have, and you call the stillness peace.

To cut the story short, it ended, eventually, it happened with an accident. A message left open on a shared laptop. Not even addressed to me, not even about me, just a sentence that didn’t belong in any conversation I was supposed to be excluded from. I read it once. I did not need to read it twice. What surprised me wasn’t the content. Some part of me had built it already, brick by brick, over months of refusing to look. What surprised me was the relief. Not happiness cause nothing about it was close to happiness but the specific relief of finally being allowed to stop pretending the room I was living in was the whole house.

I think about that night often. The buzzing phone. The slow careful door. The forty seconds I spent choosing comfort over truth, and how that choice didn’t actually protect me from anything , it only delayed the moment I’d have to feel it, and made the eventual feeling worse for having waited. I don’t know if I’d choose differently now. I’d like to think so. But there’s a version of all of us that prefers the warm dark of not knowing to the cold light of knowing for certain and I understand that version a little too well to judge her completely. Some doors stay closed not because we’re weak. Because we’re not ready to live in what’s behind them.

Tears in my eyes as I write this, knowing I’m facing two emotions simultaneously…… The feeling of heartbreak and the feeling of relief. There’s so much the heart can hold but when it can no longer hold any further the eyes are filled with emotions, be it joy or sorrow.

Well to be honest I don’t know what I’m feeling exactly, I’ve been contemplating for a week now if I should put the pen in ink or put down the pen.

Guess I’ve made the right decision.