Sometimes, I wake up in the middle of the night in a sudden panic. Is he dead somewhere? Did he drink so much that he got in a fight with someone and is now lying in an alleyway somewhere, hurt? My heart races and I call him and text him, but often there’s no answer. Those nights are the worst. I lie there and worry, tossing and turning till I hear the lumbering giant come up the stairs.
I honestly only ever imagine that something horrible has happened to him. I never once think he’s with a woman. Can you believe it? But that doesn’t mean I’m not angry. By the time he stumbles in, I’m near-hysterical.
“You are a married man! A father!” I shout at him. “You could have answered me — I thought you were dead!”
And he mumbles, “Sorry, sorry …” Always so sorry after the fact.
The best times are when I sleep soundly and don’t wake up in a panic or hear him when he comes crashing into bed. Instead, I wake up in the morning light to find him lying beside me, his breathing heavy, his adorable but drunk face so sweet looking, so calm.
And this is how it is one morning in early November 2011, when, at 5:00 a.m., he returns from the grade 12 commencement. He crawls into bed and doesn’t realize I’m awake. Turning onto his side, away from me, he lets out a huge sigh. Reflexively we wind our legs together as always. I watch his freckled back as it rises and falls with his breathing and I wonder, What are they doing, these teachers, till 5:00 a.m.? Where do you go?
He senses I’m awake and sleepily turns and looks at me, eyes half-open.
“Hi, Love,” I say.
“Do you think your psychologist could recommend me a psychologist?” is what he says back.
THE THING WE’RE IN
“I can see where this is going. I can see we’re going to fall in love,” says The Man with the White Shirt. “You think we’re going to fall in love?” I ask, and he says, “Of course! Look at us. Look at how we feel already!” This conversation is his attempt to explain why we should stop seeing each other. Again. He says he will never be in a committed relationship. He doesn’t believe in labels.
It reminds me of a conversation with The Husband, a month before The Bomb. It was day one of what I like to call The Blitzkrieg, five mini-bombs, dropped on me one at a time, starting on Christmas Day 2011, and ending the night before we got on a plane to go on a trip to Jamaica. The Blitz lasts five days before the big finale, atomic in scale and efficiency, drops on me and changes everything, irrevocably, for the rest of our lives.
With all the surprise of a lightning war, I am hit on that Christmas Day as we’re driving to his parents’ house. As soon as Birdie falls asleep in the back seat, The Husband says, “So, I’m not really sure I believe in this whole modern marriage thing.”
Modern. Marriage. Thing.
We have an abstract conversation, about marriage and the whole modernity of it. We talk about men and women and gender roles. He says men have no idea how to be men anymore, since they’ve grown up with no role models. I mention that our female role models were just as bad, but my heart is beating so loudly maybe he can’t hear me. He just goes on and on and on. Eventually, I say, “Is there anything specific you want to talk about?” And he says, “Sometimes I’m not sure I want to be married anymore.”
Just like that.
He stares out at the endless grey highway, hands fixed hard on the steering wheel and says, so quietly, “Who am I? I don’t know who I am.” At this, I give the most impassioned impromptu speech of my life. “Who are you? You’re you. You are the you you were before and the you you’re going to be. You’re thirty-eight. You’re funny and weird. You’re really tall but you always bump your head as if you have no idea how tall you are. You always want to help strangers, and you do. You laugh at the stupidest movies and that sound is my favourite thing in the world. That’s who you are.”
I say a bunch of other things, too, things I love about him or admire, things that make him who he is. And I realize I’ve just managed to give a two-minute description of him without saying anything negative. This gives me hope.
He’s so quiet. He puts his hand on my hand and squeezes it. I stare at the side of the road as it whizzes by. I close my eyes and brace myself for whatever comes next. I believed my speech, but all I keep hearing is “modern marriage thing.” He’s not sure he believes in it. Marriage. The thing we are in.
A few years later, when I fall hard for The Man with the White Shirt, here it is again. A thing he doesn’t believe in, even though he’s in it. Here he is, White Shirt, back in my bed one morning, staring at me the way he does as if I am the dreamiest thing. And that’s when I say to him, “Have you thought about what you’re going to do when you fall in love with me anyway?”
“Yes, I have,” he says, “and I think it will destroy me.”
I throw my arms up in the air, I roll my eyes, I do all the motions of exasperation because come on. I say, “But love should be the opposite of destroying!” because it should, it really should. What is the matter with everyone?
He has no response, and we just look at each other across my white sheets. His eyes are the best eyes I’ve ever looked into. They’re like the master switch for me, turning all the lights on at once. I run my hand slowly down his face, ending at his chin, where I scratch lightly at his beard. We lie there, limbs inter-locked, still looking into each other’s eyes, endlessly searching for what, I don’t know. And I want to just shake him and everyone, all of you, for being afraid to love because it might hurt.
BLITZKRIEG
It’s no wonder we so often use military terminology when describing the breakdown of love; anyone who’s been through it knows it feels just like war. A civil war more specifically, the way a nation once together suddenly finds itself divided and at arms. And so, it’s no different for me. I have told you there was a Bomb, and before it, there was a Blitz.
Day One as you know, was the “modern marriage thing” conversation. Kaboom and Merry Christmas!
Day Two, Boxing Day, we’re lying in the too-small bed of the guest room at his parents’ house when he quietly and very seriously tells me that he’s been “emotionally distancing himself” from me since the day I was diagnosed with MS. I’m stunned.
“You don’t understand how many times I’ve buried you,” he says, and I call him a drama queen. I say, “I’m not dying. It’s not cancer or anything! Why would you bury me? I’m going to live longer than you probably, you idiot!” I am pissed off and really do think he is an idiot in this moment. I can’t stop myself from calling him names and being awful because I can’t understand what he is saying to me. Why would he purposely distance himself from me because I got sick?
“Self-preservation,” is his only answer to my confused tears. A quiet, simple answer to my angry questions. Self-preservation. He pulled away from me to protect himself. But from what?
After he falls asleep, I lie awake for hours and I feel like Alice falling down the rabbit hole, looking at things that used to make sense in the real world but now float by me, past me, over me, like they were never mine to understand or keep.
Day Three of The Blitz. We are thankfully driving away from his parents’ house and back to our own. The second Birdie falls asleep in the back seat, kid-drunk on so much Christmas, I immediately ask him, “Are we breaking up?” and he says he doesn’t know.
I