Yesterday was what should have been our twelve year anniversary. Every year it comes up and surprises me with how much it still hurts. A paper cut hurt. Quick and unexpected. Bleeding more than it should with my pulse pounding in the red wound. We still mark the day. I don't remember when we began again, but it's been a few years, and last night we went for dinner and then a movie. My favourite things.
We talk in safe circles like friends with a dangerous lion crouched to pounce between them. We are honest. I think. Mostly honest. I forgive him those woundings without always understanding what that means, without always knowing what I hope for in it. He forgives me my superiority. Holds his head up as high as he feels he is allowed, disdains me on occasion to show he hasn't been completely flattened, while I admit wrong to show that I haven't become completely inflated. Still, I want to shake him. Hurt him. Wake him up to life as I know it. The burden of loneliness is more than I can manage some nights, I'm so free. But mostly, I don't want to let him in to those places. They aren't for him anymore.
We sat in the dark theatre after supper, and there was a moment where I thought I would crack, just split down the middle like a stone popped on its head by a hammer and neatly halved. I do not miss him anymore. Not his person, his self, his individual being, but I miss like hell, like hot, burning hell, the shared life, the partner, the togetherness. I miss the generic facts of being bound to another human equally. I miss. I scrambled in my seat in the theatre for a finger-hold on God like a frantic mother looking for her lost baby. I found her in the empty seat beside me and passed some burden over the armrest.
The movie ended and we walked to his car through the mall like we had done so many times when we were so married, and I remembered for an instant what it felt like to be moving together toward home. The day still makes me sad, I said to him on the drive home. Yeah, me too, he said, and we steered around the sadness to another sentence. That crouched lion. It was something. It was as good as we could do, but it costs so much.
We pulled up to my house and I reached for the door handle, said thank you and turned to smile. He reached out to hug me, and we stayed stretched from our separate seats for a moment. I love you, he said. I love you, too. And then we let go.
