The Field Between Us

A Story of Intimacy, Distance, and Love  

“Are we okay?” he asks, his voice a little softer than usual. 

I look up from our daughter’s middle-school applications scattered across the kitchen island, amidst unopened mail, granola bar wrappers, and a half-eaten apple. He’s standing in the doorway, still in his work clothes, jacket in hand, waiting for an answer I don’t have. The scent of the mustard oil tempering still lingers in the air.

Did he pick up the parathas as I’d asked?

I study his lean frame. He hasn’t changed much in the twenty-four years we’ve known each other—the same 142 pounds, scraggly hair, strong jawline, broad shoulders. The same unabashed air of self-confidence, commanding presence in a room. The same intensity in his eyes but also an emptiness.

How do I compress a quarter century of a life together into a simple yes or no? Where do I begin? How do I explain that “okay” feels too small a word for what we are, what we aren’t, and what we could still become?

A squeak, urgent, shrill. The puppy needs to play. His favorite toy, “Jellyfish,” cannot wait a second longer. In a flash, he and the pup are gone.

As I place the application packets neatly into a folder and call our ten-year-old for dinner, I think about how he told me, just last month, “you are caring but not sympathetic.”

His back surgery, a result of years of improper posture, lack of exercise, and excessive travel, had rendered him bedridden briefly. 

“Well, how exactly do you want me to show you sympathy?” I’d lashed back, holding his half-eaten dinner plate. 

“You just always sound mad.”

I am mad.

Not at him specifically, but at all the things we’ve both let go unsaid. The ways we’ve lost pieces of ourselves while trying to hold everything together.

Last year on our anniversary, as I was picking at the overpriced chicken tikka masala, a dish he’s somehow come to believe is my favorite, he had casually remarked, “If we met randomly at a bar today, we’d have nothing to talk about.”

He continued sipping his beer. I stared as my fork grew blurry. 

The server asked buoyantly, “Sir, is everything ok?” 

I thought to myself, the meal was delicious, but his words were unsavory. Were they also true?

I’ve carried that comment for the last 361 days. It has lodged itself somewhere between my ribs. Would we really not choose each other if we met in the here and now? I’ve asked myself this question countless times, watching him across rooms, wondering who exactly we’ve become.

I think about how it all began … twenty-four years ago, when that original choice presented itself. Delete or answer. The subject line simply read: “About Your Poem.”

It wasn’t even marked as important or from someone I knew. A random email that should have been buried under dozens of job rejections, lost in the inbox clutter of my father’s Dell computer.

Instead, it sat there, demanding attention.

It was right after dinner—9:07 p.m.—to be precise. My parents had retired to their respective bedrooms, and I was wrapped in a shawl, awkwardly sitting cross-legged with woolen socks on my-always-freezing feet. I couldn’t sit still on my dad’s three-wheeled red tufted office chair. Outside, Lucknow’s winter pressed against the virtually uninsulated glass windows, the scent of burning coal from roadside tea stalls curling into the night.

I didn’t know who he was. I didn’t know why he had my words. I only knew that in this moment, I had a choice: ignore it, or answer. 

I answered.

Three emails later, I knew he was a hardware engineer in Santa Clara, California. By the fifth, I knew the details of his twenty-three-year-old, newly transplanted life—his childhood in Kanpur, just 120 kilometers from my hometown, the first time he showered under a waterfall, and his conviction that laughter could help one survive any challenge.

My poem, part of a website promotion, had landed in his inbox when it should have landed in a junk folder. The one I wrote at fifteen, as I was beginning to understand that words could hold the weight of things too painful to say aloud.

“Dark brown eyes which are red because of crying All hopes of escape and freedom are dying…” I never expected it to win recognition from UNICEF in 1995. Never imagined it would land on a newly-launched teen website six years later, drifting beyond my reach. And I certainly never thought that those words, typed into the void, would lead to this.

“I grew up in a house where dinner wasn’t always guaranteed,” he wrote one night. “Seriousness was a luxury we couldn’t afford. But laughter—that was free.” 

I read the words again. Then again. 

For years, I had believed my solemnity was a failing, a burden—that as an only child, a girl on top of that, I was a misfit. Misunderstood, unwanted, and unloved. My mother’s ambition of my being a well-respected doctor, crushed because of my love for words and watercolors. My father’s patient reminders that words did not build futures, only dreams. 

But here was someone who did not dismiss my words. He saw them. He wanted to understand.

The emails turned into chats on Yahoo Messenger, the only real-time conversation option back then that didn’t cost a fortune. My responses stretched into dawn, fingers flying across the keyboard, urgency replacing hesitation.

He asked about my favorite books. I asked about his worst fears. He told me about his father’s absence—weeklong trips so he could provide for their family of five, about having one pair of shorts and a shirt that he washed every evening, so he could have a clean uniform for school the next day.

I told him about my panic attacks, about feeling like a stranger in the lavishness of our marble-floored house with hand-stitched silk curtains flown in from across the country. 

“I used to think I could catch falling stars if I ran fast enough,” he typed one evening. “What did you wish for as a child?”

“To be loved,” I replied. “Just once. Completely.” 

Silence. 

Then his words appeared, deliberate and certain. “I love you.” 

It had only been a week.

By then, his emails had become my lifeline. I rushed through dinner, retreating to my father’s office with the excuse of job applications. My mother’s eyes followed me, but she said nothing. I don’t think she suspected the truth: that halfway across the world, someone was holding space for a version of me I had yet to believe in.

A job offer finally landed in my inbox on February 25. I flew from the nest for the first time, with a duffel bag full of hope. By day, I wrote for a computer magazine. By night, I lived in his emails and our never-ending chats.

On July 1st, 2001, he flew to Mumbai—138 days of knowing each other, culminating in this moment of truth. I spotted him first at the airport arrivals gate. All five-feet ten inches, as he said, but impossibly thin, a pale yellow polo shirt clinging to his frame, with Elvis Presley-esque sideburns that hadn’t been visible in his photos.

My stomach plummeted. I turned slightly, murmuring under my breath, “No, no, no, no, no. What have I done?”

He looked nothing like those photos he’d shared. I was still staring at the ground gobsmacked and unsure if my eyes would betray me, when he approached with a warm smile. “Hey! There you are!” 

There he was.

His voice—deeper than I expected, but with the same thoughtful cadence of his messages. The person who had seen me when I was invisible to everyone else.

The forty-eight hours that followed confirmed what we already knew: that this connection defied logic. We had fallen in love with each other’s minds long before our eyes met.

He convinced me to apply to journalism schools in the US—“follow your dreams,” he had said. “Life is too short.” He even paid my application fees. Months later, in a late-night chat, he asked the question that shifted everything. “What will you do after school?”

The words appeared in the chat window, simple black letters against a white background, yet they landed like a stone in my chest. My father’s voice echoed in my head: A good job. A proper life. My mother’s subtle suggestions about eligible men. The path laid out for me, brick by brick. I typed.

“I don’t know.” 

Delete. 

“I want to write.” 

Delete. 

“I want a life that feels like mine.” 

Delete. 

My fingers trembled. The cursor blinked, patient, waiting. Finally, I typed: “I don’t know. But I know what I won’t do.”

“Tell me.”

I took a breath. This was the first time I had dared to articulate it … not just to him, but to myself. “I won’t disappear into someone else’s life. I won’t become a footnote in my own story.”

His response was immediate. “Then don’t.”

Now, the printouts of those initial emails and chats are neatly tucked away in a binder—a tip of the hat to who we were. In memoriam.

Our exchanges now are rudimentary, brief, required for logistical purposes only. Somewhere along the way, we both became footnotes in each other’s stories. Not erased, not absent—just quietly existing in the margins of a life we helped build.

After dinner, we sit on our grey, minimalistic Scandinavian couch watching a rerun of This Is Us, moved to tears, yet nary an exchange. The TV flickers over his face, tracing quiet exhaustion. My Stomach-Ease tea has gone cold in my hands. Our shared alpaca blanket is the only point of connection. 

“Do you remember why you fell in love with me?” I ask, half-expecting his response to answer the question he posed earlier about us being okay. 

“You were so full of life,” he finally says, gazing at the blank TV screen. The phone dings, and he’s gone, physically still next to me but mentally a world away. Duty calls. When he returns, a half-hour later, I’ve moved on—the dishwasher isn’t going to load itself.

In that invisible gap, we both feel abandoned. He feels that way because I didn’t wait, while I feel abandoned because I wasn’t important enough to warrant his full attention.

But I carry his words again … though seemingly innocent, they stab at my heart. “You were so full of life.” As if I alone have changed and become less. Were he to try, I wonder if he could still find that person in me who was brimming with “life.”

Sometimes I catch glimpses of her when I’m alone—despite the ten pounds she’s put on, the stretch marks that won’t fade and hair that’s shorter, greyer—she’s there.

There is a quiet lonesomeness I feel, the kind that comes from not being seen. I know he loves me; I’ve never doubted that. But love isn’t just presence, it’s attention.

I feel provided for in all the ways life demands. There’s a roof over our heads, food on the table, college funds growing. All thanks to him since I became a full-time homemaker. But I miss the tenderness of being held.

I’ve stopped asking for hugs because it’s hard to keep reaching when it feels one-sided. I wrap my arms around our always-eager puppy instead, burying my face in his warm fur, drawing comfort from his unconditional affection. He keeps me warm in an unfulfilled way. 

I know I’m not blameless. I’ve retreated too, filled spaces with busyness, with my own mausoleum of silence, convincing myself it’s easier not to want more. I’ve stopped cuddling next to him on the couch, sharing personal achievements, things that worry me … stopped wiping the crumbs of jeera cookies from his face before he heads into a meeting, stopped buying him shirts.

It’s easier to keep my head down, stifle my emotional needs, share my successes and failures publicly on my blog and not be as “invested” because I’ve felt at sea for all too long. It’s easier than unpacking the weight of everything we have accumulated over the years.

I’ve played my chosen roles perfectly: the supportive wife, the present parent, the one who makes everything else possible by making herself less visible. I hear him tell everyone at office parties: “I couldn’t do any of this if it weren’t for her.” 

As I sit on the couch later that night, having tiptoed my way downstairs long after the house is asleep, I think back to August 6, 2002, when I stepped off a Lufthansa plane in Chicago, two suitcases in hand, lungs tight with nerves, having left everything I knew behind.

I had a conviction that I could make something of myself, of this life, only because I knew he’d be right there by my side. He was there at the airport. Our second in-person meeting. That decision hadn’t just changed my life—it changed ours. 

How did we go from being those people—the ones who changed each other’s lives with unfiltered, unguarded words—to these careful, measured strangers who sleep on the edges of a California king bed with our backs toward each other?

I cannot pinpoint the exact moment it happened … when we quietly slipped into roles neither of us fully chose. Him handling the things that feel “important” such as the finances, the logistics, the infrastructure of our life together. Me managing the emotional landscape: our daughter’s inner world, the relationships with extended family, the invisible labor that keeps our family connected.

There was never an outright conversation about it, just a natural, patriarchal delegation. He was the financial provider, I was the emotional laborer. He built the future while I maintained our present.

Efficiency, optimization, logical distribution of resources: hallmarks of an unhappy marriage. 

We are like a well-oiled machine—robust, dependable, mechanical. Experts at effectively managing our shared life through a “home” calendar, but strangers to each other’s inner worlds.

From friends to lovers to roommates. Somewhere, we lost the space where we existed simply as us … as two people who stayed up until dawn uncovering dreams and challenging ideas, unraveling Rumi’s poetry, bit by bit. “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”

We used to know how to find that field.

“I don’t know if we’re okay,” I type, the half-empty glass of Jack Daniels keeping me company, “but I think we’re worth more than that question.” I tell him I miss us, not who we were twenty-four years ago, but the two people who knew how to listen, who held space, who asked questions with a desire to know the answers. 

Written words have always been our truest language. They linger in a way spoken conversations can’t—allowing reflection instead of reaction, thoughtfulness instead of defensiveness.

In writing, we have always taken the time to be more considerate of each other. No tone to misinterpret, no facial expressions to misconstrue. Just sincere emotions, a rawness and purity.

I wake up late the next morning. I had spent so long grieving the love I lost that I never thought about the love I withheld. Hitting ‘send’ was the hardest thing I had done in a while.

Today is Sunday, our anniversary. Our daughter is enjoying a sleepover at her bestie’s. He’ll probably buy me flowers again—a reminder of how fragile love is, how rapidly it decays. 

I find a handwritten letter next to my daily probiotics instead. “Happy Anniversary and An Apology” it says on the envelope. I sit on the heated bathroom floor, the pup’s wet nose pressed against my thigh. “It has been 24 years since we first started talking. We talked for hours. We had so much to share with each other. Funny thing is, we had nothing in common even then, but we tried anyway. I want to keep trying …”

It went on for four more pages, and then: “This is an apology for all that I have done wrong. Can we start talking again? Can we start sharing our stories again? Can we begin to try again?” 

Silent tears streaming down my face, I know this was our chance to rebuild – not from scratch, but from the center.

Our most important truths have always been exchanged this way … in words that remain after voices would have faded, that can be returned to, reconsidered, held close. I go downstairs to the smell of freshly-brewed coffee and an omelet—the only thing he knows how to make and cooks annually. We hug. 

“No flowers for you this year,” he says with a gentle smile. 

“I never needed them,” I respond, still holding on to that embrace.

My eye catches the thick black binder on the countertop. It’s where I’ve saved all our emails and chats from our first month of interactions. I read them every February 13, retracing our beginnings, the life we’ve built, the choices we’ve made. He’s brought it out so we can flip through it together this year.

As we laugh together at all those color-coded inline replies, I know we’re worth the hard conversations, the uncomfortable truths, and the vulnerable moments of reaching out across this space we’ve let grow between us.

Perhaps, this is a new beginning … a new way to the field can be found?

One email. One response I almost didn’t send. One choice to see each other again, to make it all okay again.

And here we are, rewriting.

Originally published in Chicago Story Press, April 18 2025.