A Happy Marriage By Rafael Yglesias

...to encourage and console her, to cheer and to love her although he was scared to the bone, sick to the sould with fear.

He had waited a year for his father to succumb to a terminal cancer, and he had learned from the surprise he felt at the event that no warning of the incredible fact of mortality could adequately prepare the primitive brain nature had given him to comprehend its finality.

"You have to help me!" she gasped for air as if her feelings were strangling her.  "I can't do this without you!  I can't do this alone!  I don't have the strength to argue!  I need you to fight them for me!"

"...The Women want men to make the move...you have to show her, you're not just another friend."

"He introduced us....He brought me to you."
There were times, this was one of them, when Enrique would not breathe or speak for a moment, afraid that he would shake with the sobs he sometimes indulged when he was alone.  Overpowering sadness rose and crashed within him, a wave that thundered and drowned him, and soon disappeared without a trace on the flattened sand.

Enrique was losing the partner of his past and his present and his future just when he most desired her choreography.

..he resented them all for asking him to make them feel better that a part of their world was ending, when the very center of his was melting in his palms, slipping through his fingers, spilling onto the floor.  Soon, very soon, only a puddle of his heart would remain.

They were trying hard not to weep, presumably in the belief their tears would make Margaret feel worse, although they would, in fact, have made her feel loved.

What she longed to receive from them was acceptance and admiration.

...for a long time she had come first with him, that for many years she had been his heart's home and his mind's anchor and that fighting to keep her alive was essential to preserving his own soul.

Their times alone together gave him the most pleasure.

They had different tastes, and sometimes wanted different things from each other, and yet they had lived a happy life together.

"...I don't have any self-esteem, but I'm in love with you and I want you, I want all of you....I want you to marry me and worship me..."

...he hoped to avoid exposing her to the dread he felt at living without her.  He certainly hoped to say nothing that would hurt her...

...he wanted to tell her what she had meant to him, and to hear what he had meant to her, because soon there would be only the loneliness of monologue.

...it rang false to stay angry about anything, including death, since death was, after all, the most even-handed consequence of being alive.

...I love you, I will miss you more than anything in life, and thank you for managing to love me, the difficult, childish, malformed me, thank you, thank you, thank you...

"Thank you, Enrique.  Thank you for making my life fun.  I would have lived such a stupid life...Some dumb life, just a stupid, boring life without you."

...he wanted her because, while in her arms, he felt safe.

...what he had extracted of true value out of life was the life she had given him.

...he had come not only to need her but to love her more profoundly than ever; not as a trophy to be won...but as a full partner, skin of his skin, head of his heart, and heart of his soul.

...he felt that he was without someone who knew his real self, that he was without a place to rest, without, in a word, a home.  He had been unaware that he felt unknown and lost in the world until he met Margaret....but he did know that while gazing into Margaret's eyes he felt safe.

He grabbed her, and it came right out, although he'd never formed the thought before.  "I'm scared you'll stop loving me.  I'm so scared you won't love me anymore."
"I'm never going to stop loving you," she said as easily as if she were ordering a meal.  "You're my life," she said simply....He felt relief, a long sigh of gratitude that the race had been run, that for all his mistakes, for all his failures, for all the wear and tear he had doled out, for all that he had smashed and given away of love and good intentions and grand ambitions, for all his errors there had been an unexpected mercy, and he had not been punished.  Life had given him Margaret to make him whole.

The true nature of this separation was revealed to him as they neared the final departure.  Part of his self belonged to her and so would travel with her.  Abandoned.

...he could tell her, not these fears about his future without her, but how great the gift of her time and her affection had been, and how grateful he was to have had her, not only for all of his adult life but even for a single day.

"....You're what made my life work."

"....You'll never get away.  You'll move in with me, we'll get married...You'll be here forever," she whispered, and in the ocean of her being, he let go of the frightened air trapped in his heart, he exhaled the despair of his soul and he thought with glee: "I'm home!  I'm home!  Thank God, I'm home!"