willing & able
something i wrote in like 15 minutes sry in advance
This house was so quiet now.
Not in the way that everyone leaves the space all at once, laughter fading into the background or the sound of chatter and a door closing. It became silent. A sort of gradual, devastating way that most terrible things happen, so incrementally at first that neither of you recognized the shift until silence had already settled itself into the walls like dampness. Not silence in the literal sense because there was always sound somewhere. The refrigerator humming low in the kitchen long after midnight. Harry’s footsteps moving down the hallway with a tiredness that seemed to belong more to his soul than his body. Rain striking the windows in uneven silver patterns.
But there was an absence underneath all of it now, a missing frequency you could once feel even in sleep. Months ago, maybe years if you were being honest with yourself, Harry had stopped singing around the house.
That was the first thing to disappear.
You had not noticed it immediately because grief rarely announces itself dramatically when it first arrives. It enters quietly. Through habits abandoned. Through conversations shortened by exhaustion. Through the subtle erosion of intimacy disguised as adulthood. One day you simply realized the man who used to hum Fleetwood Mac songs while making coffee now moved through the mornings like somebody trying not to disturb a stranger.
More disturbingly to her, they stopped fighting. Their arguments rarely if ever escalated past passive aggressive comments anymore, and if it was from mouth nine times out of ten he would just sigh and walk away. She wouldn't admit it, but she was practically begging for a reaction from him. Yelling screaming, anything at this point would be better than the dull silence that has swallowed her home whole.
The rain had started sometime after midnight, startling against the windows because California never seemed entirely prepared for weather, and you stood barefoot at the kitchen sink watching the city dissolve into blurred ribbons of amber and white beneath the storm. Los Angeles looked softer in rain, almost mournful, as if the entire city had briefly remembered it was built by people trying desperately to become somebody else. Behind you, the floorboards creaked quietly before Harry even entered the room, and there was still something humiliating about the fact that your body recognized him before your mind did. You knew the cadence of his exhaustion. The particular weight of his footsteps after long flights.
The rustle of cotton against skin when he shoved his hands into the pocket of an old hoodie. He paused in the doorway when he saw you standing there, both of you suspended for a brief second in the strange formality that had begun infecting even the smallest interactions between you. Many moons ago finding each other awake after midnight would have felt intimate in the most effortless way. There would have been music playing softly from somebody’s phone, Harry leaning against you while waiting for leftovers to heat in the microwave, his mouth absentmindedly pressed against your shoulder as though affection were simply another unconscious bodily function. Now it felt almost like encountering someone you used to know extraordinarily well in a place neither of you expected to be.
“Couldn’t sleep?” he asked finally, his voice roughened by exhaustion, low enough that it seemed to dissolve into the rain.
You shook your head, arms folded instinctively across yourself despite the warmth of the house. “You?”
A tired smile touched the corner of his mouth then vanished just as quickly. “Bit obvious, isn’t it?”
The hoodie he wore used to belong to you. Black cotton, sleeves frayed at the cuffs, faint traces of detergent and cedarwood still clinging stubbornly to the fabric after all these years. He had stolen it during a winter in London so long ago now it almost felt fictional, back when your lives still seemed to be expanding endlessly toward something bright and unknowable instead of narrowing inward under the weight of schedules and distance and accumulated disappointments. Looking at him standing there in it now filled you with a strange, piercing ache because it felt symbolic somehow that pieces of you still existed absentmindedly inside him while the larger shape of your marriage threatened collapse.
Harry crossed the kitchen and opened the refrigerator without seeming to register what he was searching for, staring blankly into the pale light spilling across his face before grabbing a bottle of water more out of obligation than desire. “We should probably throw half this away,” he murmured eventually, glancing toward the shelves crowded with groceries neither of you ever seemed to cook anymore.
You let out a quiet breath that almost resembled laughter. “We buy groceries like people who have their lives together.”
Something flickered in his expression then, faint but recognizable. “We used to cook.”
The sentence settled heavily between you because that was the unbearable thing about the deterioration of your marriage. Neither of you had become cruel enough to hate. There had been no spectacular betrayal, no infidelity dramatic enough to cauterize the wound cleanly. Sometimes you almost wished there had been because at least then the grief would have possessed direction. Something sharp enough to point toward. Instead, your love had simply exhausted itself trying to survive the machinery of both your lives. Tours stretching endlessly across continents. Missed anniversaries apologized for through bouquets and frantic phone calls from hotel balconies. Exhaustion calcifying into silence because both of you became so terrified of saying the wrong thing that eventually you stopped saying anything meaningful at all.
You stopped telling Harry when you felt lonely because he already looked perpetually guilty the moment he walked through the door.
Harry stopped telling you when he was drowning because he could sense your disappointment before either of you even spoke.
Somewhere along the way, the relationship began functioning more like a beautiful old house neglected carefully rather than abandoned outright. Nothing catastrophic. Just slow decay hidden beneath polished surfaces.
“I had a dream about Florence the other night,” Harry said after a long stretch of quiet, leaning against the counter across from you while rainwater crawled slowly down the windows behind him.
Your chest tightened instantly because of course it would be Florence. The apartment with the faded green shutters and no air conditioning, where the two of you spent entire afternoons wandering narrow streets half-drunk on cheap wine and heat and the intoxicating arrogance of believing your lives would always remain that effortless. You remembered lying awake beside him with the windows thrown open to the city, scooters whining through the streets below while Harry traced absentminded circles against your bare shoulder and talked about the future with such certainty it felt impossible not to believe him. Back then he looked at you as though your existence itself astonished him. You had been twenty-six and incandescent with the naive confidence that love alone could permanently protect two people from becoming strangers.
“The bookstore closed while we were there,” you said quietly.
A smile appeared at the corner of his mouth, softer this time, touched by something almost painful. “I remember.”
“You cried.”
Harry huffed out a faint laugh beneath his breath and shook his head. “I did not cry.”
“You absolutely cried.”
“I was emotionally affected,” he corrected gently. “Entirely different situation.”
The laugh escaped you before you could stop it, sudden and warm enough to briefly illuminate something inside the room that had felt dark for months. Harry looked at you immediately when he heard it, and the expression crossing his face then nearly undid you because it carried the unmistakable fragility of somebody rediscovering something they had been quietly mourning. That was the dangerous thing about memory. It softened every edge until even suffering began gleaming beautifully from a distance. Nostalgia transformed old apartments into sanctuaries and difficult years into montages bathed in golden light. But Florence had been real. The softness of his mouth against yours in unbearable summer heat. His hand wrapped around your ankle beneath restaurant tables. The absolute certainty you carried back then that whatever happened in the future, the two of you would survive it because love seemed enormous enough to survive anything.
“We were good then,” Harry said finally, the words spoken so quietly they almost disappeared beneath the storm.
You looked toward the rain because it suddenly felt impossible to look directly at him. “Yeah.”
His fingers tightened slightly around the bottle in his hands. “I keep trying to figure out where we lost it.”
The question entered the room carefully, almost reverently, and exhaustion stripped away your instinct to protect either of you from the truth. You studied him for a long moment instead of answering immediately. The shadows beneath his eyes had deepened over the last year. Fame had altered him in ways difficult to articulate because it had sharpened and hollowed him simultaneously, sanding away certain softnesses while amplifying others. You could still see the boy you met sometimes beneath all of it, hidden in sudden crooked smiles or the way he still reached instinctively for your hand in crowded places even during the worst months of your marriage. Loving Harry had long ago stopped feeling romantic in the conventional sense. It felt geological now. Ancient and layered and impossibly heavy. The kind of love that rearranged your internal landscape permanently whether it survived or not.
“I don’t think we lost it all at once,” you admitted quietly. “I think we just got lonely.”
Harry lowered his eyes then, shoulders tightening almost imperceptibly. “Even together?”
“Especially together sometimes.”
The honesty of it hurt because it sounded cruel despite being true. You folded your arms tighter across yourself, suddenly cold despite the warmth gathering in the kitchen. “You were always leaving, and every time you came home I felt guilty for being upset because I knew you were trying. So I stopped saying things. And then you stopped saying things too.”
For a moment Harry said nothing at all. Rain battered steadily against the windows while somewhere deeper in the house the pipes groaned softly. “I’d come back,” he said eventually, voice roughened now by something more than exhaustion, “and you looked disappointed before I’d even walked through the door.”
The precision of the word made your stomach ache because disappointment was exactly right. Not anger. Not resentment. Just the terrible grief of wanting something desperately and repeatedly watching it fail to become what you needed. You sat down slowly at the kitchen table before your knees could betray you, and Harry followed a second later, lowering himself into the chair across from you with the weariness of somebody setting down a burden they no longer understood how to carry. The table between you was scarred lightly from years of living. Tiny scratches from takeout containers and wine bottles and nights spent assembling furniture together while music played too loudly through the house. Looking at it now felt strangely unbearable because there had once been so much life here.
“Do you remember New York during lockdown?” Harry asked after a while.
You smiled despite yourself, eyes lowering briefly toward the table. “When you became psychologically dependent on sourdough?”
That earned the faintest trace of a grin. “I was excellent at it.”
“You nearly burned the apartment down six separate times.”
“Creative process.”
The memory arrived with such startling clarity it almost physically hurt. The tiny overheated kitchen. Harry dancing with you in mismatched socks because the world outside felt frightening and unstable and the two of you only knew how to survive fear by making each other laugh. Flour dusted across his cheekbones. Headlines glowing endlessly from his phone while he kissed you absentmindedly between reading updates aloud. You remembered standing there one evening watching him move around the apartment with complete casual intimacy and thinking with devastating certainty that this was the person you would spend your entire life beside.
And maybe that was the cruelest part of all.
Even now, sitting across from him in the wreckage of everything the two of you had built together, you still could not imagine a future that did not contain him somewhere inside it.
Harry leaned back slightly in his chair then, eyes fixed on you with an openness that felt almost unbearable after months spent carefully avoiding honesty.
“Do you want to leave me?”
The question hollowed the air from the room.
You stared at your hands because the truth inside you refused simplicity. Sometimes you wanted to disappear entirely. Sometimes you fantasized about starting over somewhere anonymous and quiet where neither of you carried the weight of public expectation or old disappointment. Sometimes you wanted Harry to grab your face and remind you why surviving this was still worth it. Most nights you wanted all three things simultaneously.
“I don’t know,” you whispered finally.
Harry nodded once, not surprised, which somehow hurt more than if he had looked devastated. Rainwater slid slowly down the windows behind him in crooked silver lines while thunder rolled somewhere far off in the hills.
"No." you're tearing up at the thought. “Sometimes I just think maybe we’d both be happier if we stopped trying so hard,”
“And then what?” he asked softly.
You frowned slightly. “What do you mean?”
“After,” he said. “What happens after?”
You hated the question because you had asked yourself the same thing a hundred different ways already. You could imagine the mechanics of divorce with terrible clarity. Lawyers and paperwork and dividing bookshelves filled with novels neither of you could remember buying. Friends becoming careful around both of you at parties. Headlines dissecting private grief like entertainment. But every time you tried to imagine the actual shape of your life without Harry inside it, your mind simply refused to complete the thought. It felt impossible in the same instinctive way imagining the ocean without water felt impossible.
“I don’t know,” you admitted again.
Harry looked down then, his wedding ring catching briefly beneath the kitchen light.
You hadn't realized until that moment that he was still wearing it.
A strange ache moved quietly through your chest. Not hope exactly. Something more exhausted than hope. Something stubborn.
“Neither do I,” he said softly.
