I’d gotten used to the barren white walls after only a couple weeks. They were worth it for her. Anything was worth it for her. If I had to wear the same clothes day in and day out and stare at nothing but sterile, desolate white walls to see her and touch her every day – then so be it. It wasn’t that awful.
I was more than a little interested the first moment I saw her – women in university were rare, and rarer still were tall and beautiful. She should have been making some man a very happy husband, instead she was in classes.
I knew I loved her after the first time we talked. Her views on politics were absurd and naïve, and she knew it. But that didn’t stop her from fighting fiercely for her beliefs, and that more than anything was my undoing. We sat beside each other every day thereon out, and our conversations got deeper and more personal until I was asking her to marry me.
She said no.
But I never stopped asking.
Even after the abduction, and the “procedure”. In the hospital, when she was still in a coma, I’d ask her every single day to be my wife. When she was covered in cuts and bruises, and all her beautiful hair had been shaved away, I still asked. When she finally awoke and opened her eyes to look at me, I inquired more fervently.
She didn’t say no.
She didn’t say anything.
She hasn’t said anything since then.
“Good morning, my love,” I gently cooed as I ran my hand along the stiff white fabric of her assigned uniform. “Will you marry me?”
She didn’t even turn her eyes away from the dreary grey window to look at me. She made no indication that I was there.
I lifted my hand to run across the welted, angry scar that started on her right temple and snarled its way over and behind her ear. They had not been gentle when they’d lobotomized her. They hadn’t wanted her spreading her politics anymore, lest her ideas caught hold. They had said, numerous times, that she was obviously mentally unbalanced – and they’d used that to destroy her.
And me. I’d followed her into the white walls and assigned clothes and barred windows.
I’d never leave her. There was always the potential she’d someday say yes.
