Thursday August 29, 2019

My last Thursday in the house. In three days I’m gone, forever.

All my belongings are staged in the garage, awaiting loading into the moving/storage Pod later this afternoon. My wife has left for the day, having taken Bebe with her.

The house is silent. I’m alone.

I don’t know whether I’m sad, relieved, happy, miserable, or numb. Maybe all at the same time.

I don’t know whether my wife is sad, relieved, happy, miserable, or numb. She has been especially remote, almost furtive, the past few days– for her emotional benefit or mine I don’t know. I seem not to know anything about her anymore. That she wants me gone is clear.

For someone whom I’ve loved, and love, to become so opaque and distant is a relationship tragedy. I guess it’s a blessing the emotional temperature isn’t higher. Even as it is, in this time of non-communication, her slightest irritations and barely below the surface anger, when it arises, sets my heart thumping and blood pressure pulsing. I feel it instantly.

It’s early evening. The house is quiet. My wife and Bebe are spending the night in San Jose with friends. The Pods truck broke down—so they said— and delivery of the container is delayed until tomorrow. Frustrating but not a problem. I’ve rearranged my helpers. All are available.

I miss my little dog. He is my companion. But I’ll be missing him forever too soon enough. It’s right that he stays here, but I will miss him nonetheless.

I watching season one of The Bridge again. We watched it together the first time. We both thought it was the best crime show we had ever seen. Did she not love me then? Had she fallen out of love? Did she know, then, she would divorce me?

I think she loved me once. She said she did. She does not lie. She doesn’t always say all that needs to be said, but she doesn’t lie.

Mark Twain wrote, “Never allow someone to be your priority while allowing yourself to be their option.”

My wife was my priority. I was never hers. She hated that she was mine.

What hope is there in a marriage like this?

What hope is there in a world like this?

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

My love, my wife, wasn’t true to me, only to herself. She said she had clarity of vision.

I’m happy for her that she can be so sure.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always

(Still the dead one lay moaning)

I was much too far out all my life

And not waving but drowning.

She had the ability to throw a lifeline but didn’t. She knew that’s what I wanted so withheld it. Because she had clarity of vision.

I’m happy for her that she can be so sure.