Sweet Romance11 min read
Pumpkin Porridge, Snow, and the Promise He Left
ButterPicks25 views
I met him when I was twenty-seven. I didn't know then that he had come to that first meeting mostly to answer to his family.
"We should at least meet," his mother had said over the phone three days before. "You two are close in age, and—"
"I'll go," he told her. "If it helps, I'll go."
So he came. We talked. Two weeks later we were engaged. Two months later we were married.
"I promised myself," I said to a friend soon after, "that if I could not find love by twenty-seven, I'd marry the richest man I could reach. I gave up that plan."
"You did?" Delaney laughed and poked my arm. "Then you found someone sweeter than money?"
"He is sweet," I said. "But he is not easy."
"What's his name?"
"Griffin."
"Griffin who?"
"Griffin Karlsson."
Delaney's eyes grew wide. "Karlsson. That sounds... cultured."
"He smiles a certain way," I went on. "Quiet. Small smiles. That was enough."
The wedding felt urgent and small and luminous at once. We did not know one another well. We had the polite conversations couples have when they are still learning which words are safe. We arranged furniture. We split tasks. We learned each other's coffee orders.
The night of our reception he drank too much.
"I'll be fine," he murmured in the bathroom. He bent over the sink and turned white. I held a cup of water in the doorway.
"Do you need anything?" I asked.
He did not look at me. He swayed toward the living room and curled on the floor like someone folding himself small.
I put the cup down on the coffee table and knelt. "Are you cold?"
He shook his head. He looked at me as if he had just been given a single terrible thought and was both surprised and tired by it. "How long does life go on like this?" he said, softly, with a voice that made the room colder.
I laughed, thinking it was the drink. "How long will you be like this?" I said. "Get up."
He pushed my hand away, turned his face to the ceiling, and said, "I want to be alone."
That night I opened the bedroom window. The autumn air was sharp. Dry leaves cracked under the streetlights. For a long time I stared at the branches and asked myself the same question he had: how long must one settle?
The next morning he sat at the breakfast table with his hands folded, as if he had been waiting for me. He told me he did not want children for the foreseeable future. He said he worked mornings and came home late. He said I should not wait up for him.
"You like someone else, don't you?" I asked, before I could stop myself.
"Yes," he said.
I nodded. "I'll give you time," I told him.
He returned to his porridge without looking up.
Days passed like that—small acts to fill the spaces. He would answer messages. He would appear on the doorstep, sometimes with a simple stew still warm in a pot. Once he stopped me in the snow and wiped the flakes from my hair, as if he had found pleasure in small rescues.
"You could have called," I said, embarrassed.
"I didn't want you to think I'm always hovering," he told me.
"You're prickly," I said.
"A little," he owned, with that small smile that made something inside me soften. "I married you because it was the practical choice. You were steady. You were there."
"Do you regret it?" The words came out before I realized I had said them.
"No," he answered, and there was no fire in the denial, only a rough, honest quiet. "I regret the mess I made in my own heart."
That was all I had for a while. I lived in the quiet spaces. I taught classes. I walked to the park in the evenings. I listened to a guitarist until the last note faded. Once, at a friend’s birthday, I asked loudly, drunk and brave, "Do you know what it means to be paired by convenience?" The room went still. Delaney slapped my shoulder and said, "Don't be dramatic." Then Griffin came home and smoothed things over by bringing pumpkin porridge—my favorite—warm and sweet, and sitting with me until I fell asleep with my head heavy on his shoulder.
He had always been careful in small things. He learned how I liked my rice porridge. He bought two identical pairs of shoes for the trips he thought we would take. He sent charger packs to the place I went to teach for three months. He wrote little things in a notebook—notes about errands, whole drafts of travel plans, a list of the thirty places he wanted us to go. He also carried guilt like a second pocket.
"I tried to not ruin this," he told me one night when the room was quiet. "But I have ruined a lot before you."
"What is the limit of 'ruin'?" I asked.
He laughed, low. "I don't know yet. But I'm trying."
Then the first real rupture: I found out he had loved someone in college—a dancer who left to pursue fame, whose rumors and scandals broke them apart. She was never fully public. He missed her. He said he never stopped wondering, waiting.
"You can't marry a shadow," I told him.
"I didn't," he said. "I married you."
That admission was not a triumphant thing. It sat like a bruise. But life kept sewing itself back up, thread by careful thread. He got sick once—an acute gastric thing—and I drove him to the hospital at midnight, held his hand while the lights hummed above him, and watched the soft, guilty lines around his eyes relax.
"I am grateful to you," he said, clinging to the hospital bed's rail like it was a raft. "Thank you."
"For what?" I said.
"For being here," he said. "For not making a big speech about letting me go."
We had small joys after that. He learned to cook pumpkin porridge the way I liked it, steaming the pumpkin, mashing it with a spoon until it was thick and sweet. He would come to the classroom with a thermos. He would wipe my hair away from my face as if I were both a child and an entire safe harbor. The cracks did not disappear, but they were hidden.
On a winter afternoon, I got into a small fender-bender on the way to buy candied hawthorn on peace night. I was surrounded by a small mob and an angry woman who shouted like she wanted the whole street to hear. I was sweating, embarrassed, and about to pay and leave, when he pushed through the crowd and stood beside me.
"What's going on?" he asked.
He spoke to the woman like he was naming her and then the crowd folded away. He took my bag and led me to the car as if we had always belonged to the same shape of life.
"Why did you come?" I asked in a voice that was part gratitude and part accusation.
"Because you shouldn't stand like a small bird in a storm," he said.
That night he carried me into the house like a warm animal. He stayed, read me old stories, hummed, and in the quiet he told me again, "I will not leave you."
When we learned I was pregnant, the word filled the house like sunlight. He laughed and cried and made ridiculous plans. He wrote the date I should have the baby into a notebook, then crossed it out and rewrote it, studying calendars like a conspirator.
"Where did this come from?" Delaney asked when I told her.
"Luck," I said. "Or chemistry. Or both."
Then the world shifted. I went into the hospital—a slip on a ladder, a sudden, violent pain. The doctors moved faster than time. It was an empty room and a hollow in me after. We lost the baby. The world rearranged itself around that absence.
He came rushing from work, breath cutting sharp as winter wind, and sat by my bed.
"It wasn't your fault," he said. "I should have been there. I should have checked."
"You couldn't have known," I whispered.
He choked on the excuse but pressed his face to my hair and promised he would not let me bear pain alone again. He told the reporters that a staff member at a mall was hurt and he had helped; he told me he had been holding another's hand. Social media spun its threads. People misread silence and made a sound of rumor. My grief was private but the commentary was not. I moved away for a while—took a teaching post out of town to breathe, to step off the treadmill of our small city's murmurs.
He wrote to me every day. He thought of everything before I missed it: mosquito spray, a backup battery, the exact brand of bread I liked. He mailed slippers and a bright water bottle. He visited the mountain school and stayed for a week, listening to my lectures and teaching a lesson, and then we returned like two people pulling a wagon together.
One night in that small town, a strange, violent thing happened. A man, mentally unwell, followed me home and threatened me with an axe. I was knocked down; the man shouted that I was his wife. The air smelled of oil and panic. I remember Griffin's voice: "Get back." I remember him stepping between the man and me, hands fast as if saving a child's life.
"Don't move!" he told the man. "Let her go!"
The man laughed and raised the axe. In a breath that stretched, Griffin disarmed him, took a slash meant for him instead, and blood opened on his side. He curled around me like an umbrella and told me not to be afraid. In the small clinic they stitched him, and in the minutes while he was being treated I wanted to cry, roar, throw plates, stop the world for a second—anything but wait.
That night in the dark room he lay white but alive. "I should have stopped him sooner," he said like a child confessing a crime.
"You stopped him," I told him. "You are here."
We learned that tenderness was sometimes stitched with pain. He limped for a few weeks but was alive. It made no sense that bravery should hurt us both so much, but it also made sense that bravery and love were braided now.
Winter came around again and he grew tender in ways that confused me. He would surprise me with little cakes, take my coat off when I left a party, and, once, in public, he kissed my forehead in that way that tells the world what a person already knows: you belong to me.
"You never do that with anyone else," a neighbor said once with a little laugh.
"That's because she isn't everyone else," he replied.
Then he fell ill. A small cut, an old rusted metal's poison, and his body convulsed with a sickness that lit the hospital with alarms. Nurses whispered. We stayed in the emergency corridor like people in a storm. The doctors said he had contracted tetanus: a word that makes your muscles go traitor. He fought. He cried out. For all his calm, the disease showed everything.
One night, strapped to a bed with the machine breathing for him, he reached out a hand and fumbled a small red apple through the gap between the beds.
"This is your third Peace Night apple," he mouthed.
"I want you to live," I said as if I could pull him through by sheer wish.
He turned his head and smiled with the corners of his mouth, as if on the far side of pain he could still keep a private joke. "Promise me," he said. "Promise you won't punish yourself with men who aren't mine."
"I promise," I said, foolishly, like a child that a promise can hold anything.
He came back to us slowly. For a long time I sat beside him, reading silly books, bringing him hot pumpkin porridge in tiny bowls, telling him the story of everything we would do when we were both well. He would take the spoon, close his eyes, and seem to store the porridge in the part of his chest that was made of memory.
When he returned to health there was a fierce new tenderness in everything he did. He planned trips. He wrote lists of places to go. He scratched plans into a notebook so the couple we were could become another version of itself: warm, domestic, ordinary in the best way.
"I wrote thirty-nine trips by the time you came home," he admitted one evening. "Wanna go down the list?"
"Thirty-nine?" I laughed. "Start with our own street. Save the airfare for later."
He taught me to be silly in public again. He held my hand when I was nervous at the doctors. He set a name book on my lap and we read names aloud like poets: "If it's a girl, do you want 'Jun'?" "No, not that. He has to be different."
"Then how about 'Year'?" he said and made a foolish face.
"You're ridiculous," I told him, then leaned against him because his ridiculousness was like a tide I could anchor against.
When the baby—our baby—was born in a season of dry cold, we dressed him in a little knit hat and called him what we'd joked about: "Year," a name that meant continuance. Griffin held our son and looked at me like the sun had been concentrated into one person.
Those quiet, blessed days were not free of hard seams. There were business troubles: a company in trouble, long nights of worry, counting pennies and making bread from what felt like borrowed flour. I sat with him at our kitchen table and told him to keep going.
"If I fail," he said once late at night, eyes red but determined, "we'll start again."
"We'll build something," I said. "I'll be the shield."
He wobbled at the thought at first but then smiled that small, stubborn smile I had loved the day we met. "You are the shield," he repeated, as if pleased by the role.
There were small jealousies and awkward nights. There were friends who said things, people who misread the silence. But there were visits to the sea where the sunset made even his blunt profile a painting, and he taught our son to call him Dad in a voice that made my throat ache.
Years in, our routine grew like a comfortable house. He would keep a lamp on for me. He opened the door for me and our child. He left lists in the kitchen with places we'd go: E'rhai, Beijing, Chongqing. He always put the little notebook on top of the pile, as if to remind me that his small plan was a promise.
One evening, walking to catch a bus after teaching, I saw a closed porridge shop with a sign that made the board look older than the rest of the street. I thought of him and of the way he'd let me hold him when things had been terrifying and then had promised to take me to a thousand places. I put a little bowl of pumpkin porridge on a nearby bench the way people leave small gifts at memories—they are to be shared, and I wanted to imagine the taste of what he had taught me.
Years later, the street changed. People moved. Our son grew. Sometimes a wind would catch the card of his old plans and spin it like a small kite. We would laugh at something small and then at night, when the house was quiet, he would press his palm to my back and murmur, "I love you."
Once, on a cold evening when the snow came down like a curtain, I found myself standing before his grave. I spoke to him as if speaking across a table. "I brought pumpkin porridge, the kind you taught me. It tastes the same," I told him.
"You never stopped believing," he would have said, wearing that small smile. I smiled at him anyway. "We failed and we succeeded and we loved," I said. "I did not expect to hold all these feelings like pearls."
I put my hand on the worn wood sign of a porridge stall—a small place called "Tonight." I had been there many times alone, watched the server wrap my bowl in plain paper. I had wept there once, when I spilled the porridge and everyone stared. A stranger sat with me and then a voice said, "Don't cry."
It had been his voice, in a dream. I woke up in my own bed and found his hand holding mine. He was there, always there in the places that mattered.
"Promise me," I told the empty air, "that I'll always be brave enough to keep loving like this."
I heard soft steps behind me, the sound of a man returning home after closing the shop. It was years and memories and thin light. I turned, only to see the street, only to see my reflection in the shop window—older, worn, but steady.
My life had been ordinary and it had been plundered and it had been mended. It had bits of comedy and some sharp, unbearable grief. It had pumpkin porridge and a small boy named Year who grew up fast.
The last thing he wrote me, before he left, was a note with a small apology and a joke: "If I come back as a ghost, tell them I will still insist on carrying your bag." I laughed and cried and then turned the page and went on.
On some nights when the air is still, I can still feel his hand warm on the back of my neck: the habit of a man who learned too late how to say everything he meant. I live with those small constellations of memory—the apple, the porridge, the notebook—and I take our son to the sea and tell him the silly, terrible story of how his father loved badly and loved better after learning the shape of being brave.
"Do you want pumpkin porridge tonight?" I ask Year, and he grins.
"Yes, Mama," he says, all mouth and growl.
I make it just the way he taught me, steaming the pumpkin until it is forgiving and soft. I carry a bowl out onto our small balcony where the city hums and the old sun sets in the exact shade he once loved. The heat from the porridge fogs my glasses. I breathe the steam and listen for a familiar small laugh that belongs to the life we made together.
"To the places," I say to the bowl, to the night. He would have answered me in some small voice about the 39 trips, or the apple, or the way to hold a small person tight. I smile, and for a second, the night is full of soft, ordinary wonder.
The End
— Thank you for reading —