When the acceptance message arrived, I ran from the room and showed Ognjen my phone. It was the job for which I had studied for months, submitted applications, and turned our table into piles of notes. He hugged me, said he was proud, then fell silent. His face did not look celebratory. The offer included several months in another city. We had known from the beginning, but only now had it become real.
I immediately asked whether he wanted me to refuse. He said no. I did not believe him because I imagined support as joy without remainder. I said he was spoiling my happiest day, and he retreated to the kitchen to wash glasses. Later it hurt to remember how quickly I turned his sadness into a demand he never voiced. I was accustomed to love being proven by how well another person concealed their own loss.
That evening he said he wanted me to go and was simultaneously sad that we would live apart for a while. He did not ask me to resolve that feeling by declining. He wanted permission to be sad without accusation that he was holding me back. I sat beside him and admitted I feared leaving too, so needed his complete enthusiasm as confirmation that my decision was safe. Each expected an emotion from the other to make our own easier.
We spent the following days planning ordinary matters. When to talk, how to divide visiting expenses, what to do about plants and arriving parcels. We did not make the plan a promise that no evening would be difficult. Ognjen came suitcase shopping with me. When I chose an oversized one, he laughed and said a few months did not require moving the whole apartment. For the first time that day laughter concealed nothing.
I had good and bad days in the new city. Sometimes I hesitated to tell him things were hard, afraid he would think I should not have gone. He never said that. He listened, then described his day, which continued without me. On his first visit he did not assess how much better my new life was. He helped find a shop open late and met the colleague with whom I drank coffee.
Months later I returned with more belongings than the suitcase could hold. Ognjen welcomed me happily and slightly awkwardly, accustomed to his own routine. This time I did not call his uncertainty a lack of love. I left my bags by the wall, sat beside him, and asked how he wanted to spend the evening. The good news of returning, like the news of leaving, was allowed more than one feeling.