Love lived two doors away - LoH contest #275

If love were honest, it would admit this:
it enjoys a good disguise.

I, for one, judged it and misjudged it
for I was certain it had abandoned me.
Vanished quietly.
Left me to make peace with arrangements, approvals, and futures that fit everyone except myself.

You see, the love I was raised on came with conditions.
Rules.
Judgment.
A narrow view of women and an even narrower view of joy.

So when love failed to appear in holy places, social circles, family gatherings, clubs, pubs, bars, fancy restaurants alike, I assumed it was gone entirely
like chewing gum.
Fresh at first. Full of promise.
Then suddenly tasteless, rubbery, and quietly spat out when it stopped entertaining.

So, being the diligent planner I am, I began preparing for a different ending.

Spoiler alert: not my finest moment.

But sometimes a woman is faced with two paths and can only choose one
even when both feel like a kind of loss.

So there it was:

Moving back home.
Accepting the marriage that waited patiently for my compliance.
Trading freedom for correctness and calling it maturity.

It all sounded very sensible.
Which should have been my first warning.

Because love, as it turns out, does not knock.
It watches.

It waits.

It lived two doors away from me for a year
while I was busy mistaking endurance for virtue.

And then, on the very night I had decided to stop hoping
love chose to make an entrance.

Picture this.

An elevator.
Late evening.
Girls’ night.
One bottle of wine already gone. Another clutched for courage.
Jeans. Pumps. No make up - no armour.

The doors opened.

And there it stood.

Not dramatic.
Not announced.
Simply… present.

I gasped.
Not elegantly.
A snort, actually. The kind that betrays you immediately.

And before dignity could intervene, I heard myself say,
“Oh wow. Join us for drinks.”

To a stranger.

Deadpan.
Unbothered.
As though this were not the moment my carefully planned life tilted slightly off its axis.

Love wore a bow tie.
Beautifully.
The kind of detail that suggests intention.

Love looked tired.
The worst day kind.
The kind that makes you wonder what stories someone carries home with them.

The doors closed.

And in that quiet descent, I had two thoughts.

The first:
“When will I see you again?”

The second:
“Will my father approve?”

One of these questions would matter greatly.

The other would not.

So it turns out, I completely misjudged love upon first meeting it and later discovered:

I thought it needed drama.

It needed an elevator.