We'll Get Through This

CHAPTER 03

MAYA'S POV

I just couldn't stop thinking about the conversation I had with the elderly man who had been rescued in the fire earlier. His words echoed in my head, and I didn't know how to deal with the new feelings that surged inside me.

I thought it was all very clear in my mind, my ambition was something I just couldn't let go of. I was shaped to pursue success and prioritize what would make me stand out in the world: gold medals and then rise through the ranks within the Seattle Fire Department. That's my goal. It's my biggest goal.

It was.

I knew a few weeks after I met Carina that she would definitely take first place in my priorities and that scared me tremendously. I think that was part of the reason I almost ruined the best relationship I ever had. I didn't want to give up space, I didn't want to give first place in my priorities to one person because then it wouldn't depend on my hard work.

Loving someone is being vulnerable to being hurt, and putting a person as the top 1 priority in your life was blindly trusting that they wouldn't hurt you. And Carina, to this day, has played a brilliant role in not hurting me.

But then this random man comes along and says to me: I wouldn't forgive myself if I didn't allow myself to feel everything I can feel next to the love of my life because having things isn't nearly as gratifying as feeling things. You can have things alone or with other people, but some things you can only feel with the person you love the most in the world. With this one person, you chose to spend the rest of your life with. You're married, you know what I mean. This house is going to be demolished, we won't even save the foundation, but it doesn't matter because having things is fleeting, we had this house and now we'll have a new one, but if I had lost my wife, the love of my life, to this fire, I could never feel what she makes me feel. Not a day of my life.

In the last few weeks, we got closer, we saw each other more often, we didn't avoid each other anymore. It was good to come home and smell Carina's wonderful food around the house, it was good to have her ask me to change her car's headlamp, it was good to be able to sleep at night with her head on my chest as she moved. in your hair.

Although going without sex for over a month is quite challenging, especially with the wonderful wife I have, life was still getting back to normal. We finally started to meet again midway and became the couple we were before the baby talk.

I was doing my best to overcome the guilt I felt in therapy, Dr. Lewis continued to help me through this process, telling me how I shouldn't live under the expectations of other people and that I had to make peace with the decisions I made.

And all of that now seemed to make no sense.

A simple conversation with a random man had made me think more than a full month of therapy.

It was like something clicked inside of me.

-Andy, you know how difficult it is when a firefighter gets pregnant, don't you? Your mother was a great example of how pregnancy can end a career... – I started while pacing the locker room at Station 23.

-I thought you were here to aske me out for a drink after work. – Andy untied her boots, sitting on one of the benches in the middle of the locker room.

-Yeah, yeah. That too. But...

-Maya, it wasn't the pregnancy that ended my mother's career. It was the idea that she and my father had that pregnancy had to end my mother's career. They were the ones to blame for her professional failure, not her pregnancy. – Andy said, undoing the snap buttons on her shirt. - Were things easy? No. But she could have continued her professional life after a while.