by J. R. Rogue
"How did Logan take the news?"
"After announcing my engagement on Facebook, Logan deleted me as a friend. I texted him, asking why, though I knew. He said ‘I can’t look at that. I can’t.’ So I told him I was sorry and he told me not to be. He said he did this, that it was his fault."
"Did you agree with him?"
"Yes. But it still hurt to hurt him, to believe that I would never see him again. I tried to push it away, to focus on the planning and moving back in."
"Did it work?”
"For the most part. Love is never enough, is it?"
"No. You have to work at it. You have to find someone who wants to do the hard things with you."
"I believed Logan was my soulmate. But what do you do when someone is your soulmate, and you aren't theirs? My belief died with that knowledge. He made me believe in soulmates and then he made me un-believe."
"You don't believe in soulmates now?"
"No. You find someone and you love them and they love you back. You choose each other every day. On the hard days when you can't stand their voice. On the days when their face is the last thing you want to wake up to. You choose them on those days just as ardently as the days when their love is a song in your heart and you just need their arms around you. You do the work and you just don't give up. That's what I was going to do. I was going to choose Connor and I was going to do the work. Until I couldn't." The air is heavy between us, I feel myself retreating. I see my hands moving, paying a tab, leaving a tip. “I don’t know how to go on. I don’t know how to make this work. I can’t tell it this way, not anymore.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Okay. Do it in a way that works. A way that works, for you and only you.”
Part V
73
One Small Solace
The air feels different when I land. Humid, rifling. It’s spring, March, but I feel no blooming in my chest, just a hammering, a wretched need to peel my skin off so Connor can’t find me.
He does though. He has no sign in his hand, nothing cheesy for his long-gone wife. We could find each other in every room, any room. I fiddle with the handle of my carry-on as I approach him, wanting to avoid his eyes.
“Let me get that,” he says.
I let him, then I take the lead, but I feel a tug on my arm.
“You don’t need to rush off. Look at me,” he says.
I turn back, set my jaw. His eyes are sad, but not nearly as sad as the last time I saw him, when he knew I was leaving. He pulls me into a hug. I forgot how large his arms were, the way he held me full body. He speaks into my hair.
“Thanks for coming.”
“Of course.” I pull away and avoid his eyes again.
“Okay let’s go,” he says, walking ahead of me.
I always liked following him into a crowd. He knew how anxious I was when I was in a sea of people. The way I would grip his hand at the mall, on the sidewalk, at a party. He liked to make me feel safe.
His home is inviting, warm. I wonder who helped him decorate.
It’s not the way it was when I left, warm wood walls, creams, and red. A rusty star hung on the wall above the fireplace back then. Everything now is black, white, and grey. Like my heart, like the skyline I love back in Seattle.
There is an engagement picture on the wall, our engagement picture. I'm surprised it’s still up. He catches me looking at it.
I watch him cross the room, take it off the wall.
When he turns back I see the lines around his eyes. His hair has more salt and pepper beneath his ball cap.
“I just need to change and then we can head out,” he says.
I nod and let him leave the room. Better for me to be alone, so I can pour over his life. Warm light spills into the living room, pulling me there. The couch is dark leather, chocolate, and smooth. I run my hand over the armrest of the loveseat. A dog runs into the room and my heart freezes. It’s our youngest dog. I drop to my knees and invite him into my arms. His tail wags and he whines, I whimper in response.
When I left, I left with the cat. He kept our dogs.
Connor found me like that a few minutes later. On the floor, holding this dog. Once our dog.
No children suffered from our separation. One small solace.
74
She Is The Sea
Connor
Now that she was my wife, I wanted to show her my love in every way possible. Through acts of service to her. Acts of kindness. I wanted to tell her how I felt. Send her emails on the days I was at work. When she was home in a dark place, I wanted to rush home.
I wanted to show her in every way I could, how much I loved her. I took her for granted before. I thought it was enough to say I love you when she said it. I thought it was enough to put a roof over our heads, to provide monetary affections.
I was raised to only say I love you when someone was dying, when things got shitty.
I rebelled against that thinking in the beginning, like most did, when I was high off my crush on someone. Eventually, I would fade into a gentle complacency.
I did it with Gwen. I didn't appreciate her the way I should have.
Now, I wanted to show her in every damn way, that she was the end for me.
When she was leaving me, and I knew it hurt her to tell her, but I said I would never love anyone like her. I would fall for someone bright, light, alive. It wasn't what I wanted, but I tried to let her believe that.
I wanted to let her know that if she truly did leave me I would move on. I see now that I was using it as a way to emotionally manipulate her. We'd both done it, used and abused each other. But why let that past define us? I wanted to start over. I loved her more now than I ever had before. I'd seen everything inside of her that she thought was ugly, and I had seen the parts that truly were ugly.
Because no human has all good in them.
The hate she has in her heart, I want to pretend it isn't there, but it is.
I could bear it. I could bear all her hate and her ugly. I could be the shield between her and the world if she would just let me.
When she is falling, I will pull her up. That's what I’ll do and it’s what I am meant for.
I will move. I will travel the world. I will follow her anywhere. I have a stubborn father. I have his bones inside of me. I've broken free from the stoicism he instilled in me. I have changed.
She is worth it. Everything.
They say you shouldn't change for someone but what I have done is grow. I am a better man because of her. I am a stronger man because of her. I have new grey in my hair, in my beard. I wear it proudly.
The day she left is the day I woke up. I knew then, I needed to change my ways.
She wanted me to find a life with a new woman but there is no other woman. There is just Gwen and I love her black heart. I don't want to change it, but to ease the ache, to give her the family she never had.
Maybe it won't be the one I dreamed about, but I cannot half-ass it with a stand-in lover. I've tried and I've never felt more off, more like a liar.
I don't know how to convince her I will stay in any other way than by staying.
The act will speak for itself. Other men have given her words. Always words. False ones, not true like her writing. It's not like I've never lied to get a woman. I think most guys have. So I can't blame them completely. But any man who gets between her and me, I will wear them down. They cannot be steady like me.
I know her heart tells her settling down is boring, stale.
But I know there is an anxiousness holding onto her, that craves the stability I own. The constant, standing still.
She is the sea, the saltwater she craves.
I can be her rock. I will become any mountain, anywhere, that she needs me to be. I can give everything up for her.
75
Someone Like You
When I open the door of the bathroom, I come face-to-face with my husband. He looks like home, like second chances.
He's taken me to our favorite bar in downtown St. Louis.
Dinner has been broken conversation, vague searchings. I don't know what he wants from this visit, from us.
Marriage was not a fix for what ailed us. For our demons.
When I said yes to Connor, our problems did not magically float away.
My depression did not dissipate. My anxiety did not exit the room. Some days everything was amplified.
Some days I was convinced love alone could save me when deep down I knew that was a dangerous lie. It was a violent sea, being with me.
My anger became amplified at times. When Connor suggested therapy again, I raged, I rebelled.
When I finally gave in, I half-assed it. I couldn’t give up my control. I wanted it in all things. I couldn’t get better for him.
I had to get better for me. And even then, I wasn’t ready. After two months of going just to please him, I found a strange thing happening. I looked forward to going. I quit. And then I left him.
We were married only eleven months.
Connor smiles at me and I walk back to our table. I enjoy the silence while he is gone, but a voice finds its way back to me. It's in my head, a drumming.
Someone like you. It’s so hard to be with someone like you.
It's a sentence I say over and over in my head. I practice it with different voices. The voices of different lovers who have left. Found me to be “too much".
I weigh and measure myself by standards that I do not place on others. Do I bring in enough money? Do I cook enough? Clean enough? Am I the perfect partner?
No. Definitely, not on paper, and I am in control of this paper.
It's a blurry line. Have I done this to myself or did society do this to me? Did Connor do this to me? Did his family do it to him? They gave him the perfect life, setting him up for failure, for this comparison syndrome.
When Connor returns, he stands at the table, he doesn't sit.
"What?" I ask, looking up at him. I don't like men standing over me. He knows this. There must be a strain in my eyes.
"Sorry," he says, realizing his error. He sits. "I think we should get out of here. It's too loud in here, I don't know why I thought we should talk here.”
"Okay," I say, reaching for my coat and standing. I don't care where we are for this, for whatever this is.
It was raining when we walked outside. We half ran, half walked to his car. He opened the door for me and I could hear my breathing, amplified, a chorus of fear inside.
We sat still inside, watching the rain, for five minutes, before he spoke.
"It took me a long time to find an answer to the one question you always asked: why do you love me? I never knew anyone as sad as you. I never knew someone so passionate about sticking up for people. Not just the people you knew but the people in the world. You weren't necessarily like that when I met you, but that's the woman you grew to be. Some nights during our short-lived marriage," he half laughs, we were still legally married, it wasn't over, "we would be lying in bed and you would talk for hours about the way you wanted to change the world. The way you wanted to make it fairer for everyone. My friends think you're naïve. That you don't see the world for what it is. I think they’re wrong. You see the world exactly for what it is and that's why it hurts you so much."
I begin to cry, competing, losing to the rain.
"That's why you were so sad all the time. You weren't just sad about the things that happened to you. You absorbed all the hurt that the world had."
I was shaking my head, agreeing, wishing it away, I didn't know.
"When I was younger, I cared about superficial shit," he says. "On paper, you were exactly what I wanted. You are still exactly what I want but it runs deeper than your beauty. It's who you are and who you are trying to be. What can change in a year? I don't know if you still write the way you did, try the way you did, but in my mind you do. When you would ask me years ago why I loved you, I could only give you one answer."
I thought of a night on our tan sheets, fresh from the drying.
"Why do you love me?" I asked, needing something, because I could feel myself falling again, into the black.
"It’s because you're real," he says those words next to me, the same words he said back then. "You were never fake. Sometimes I wished you would fake it. I wished you were better at small talk, better at socializing. But that's not you, and I spent too many years trying to put you in a box."
"You weren't as bad after we got married." My voice is small in the swelling space. His hand is on the center console, close to mine.
"Not as bad, but still doing it. It wasn't until you left that I realized all the things you hated about me were true. I was obsessed with money. But only because it meant giving you a better life than you had grown up with. I wanted to take care of you, provide for you. I wanted to have children with you and give you the children you never had."
"I stopped wanting that and you lied, you pretended you stopped wanting it, too."
"I know. My obsession with giving you the white picket fence life caused me to miss all the signs, the direct words, too. We both changed but we didn't change together. I don't know if there's anything more heartbreaking than knowing the things you want in life are no longer the same as the things the person you love wants."
I never thought I was the mothering type but he said he knew I would've been the best one. He still remembers the days in the beginning when I would smile at him and grab his hand and tell him I just wanted a little girl of my own. That was before the memories came back.
"You never gushed over babies and you never really knew how to talk to children. You talked to children like adults, but I never told you I thought that was the right way to do it. For some reason, you feel like you're doing it wrong. Everything. I've never known someone to write down their failures so intricately the way you did. Sometimes I hated the fact that you started writing."
"Trust me, I could tell. It's one reason I left."
"You were digging your own grave with it. Writing down every little flaw, dissecting it."
I cannot deny it. I like it that way. "I just picked up where you left off."
"I think you spent so many years confusing love and obsession, it was hard to separate the two."
"What was I obsessed with?" My writing, my pain. I already know the answer.
"It used to be me. Then, it wasn't."
"Your jealousy, it killed us. I learned to hate you." I did. The sound of his voice, the way he cleared his throat when he woke up in the morning. The way he whimpered in bed, at night, just wanting me to reach out to him.
"Hate and love run a lot closer to another than we want to admit. I spent a long time hating you, but I never worried that I wouldn't remember what it was like to love you. I didn't even know why I wanted you to come back here. I just wanted to look you in the eye. To tell you that you're not the only one in the world who's felt pain. That what you did to me may not be as bad as what you've been through. But it is significant. I am significant."
“I can’t sit in this car with you. I can’t sit here and hear this.” I am frantic, I roll down the window, the rain comes in, and I push my face into it. Connor reaches for me but I push him away. “Don’t touch me!” He recoils, I see his memory, his wound, open again. I screamed those words at him before. He was the one I gave my hate to. The one I punished for what my stepfather did to me.
He pulls away, reaches for the window controls on his left side. My window goes up and I stare forward, my face slick with tears and the sky’s weeping.
He starts the car and we leave the parking lot.
76
It’s All Shit
We arrive at the park and I am not sure, of anything. Why I flew here, why he wanted me to.
We used to bring our dog here. We used to hold hands and lie on a blanket in the
grass. I often forgot those days, the good ones. I watch Connor get out of the vehicle, his form casts shadows on the grass, then his lights go out. His lights would have gone out if I had stayed.
I follow him, the only thing in my hand is one notebook, the one detailing our marriage. The sound of the passenger door of his Range Rover echoes in the night.
When I reach him, he is sitting on a swing, lazily swaying forward, backward. Like we used to do.
“Tell me what it’s like.” He speaks to his shoes, a worn pair of boots I have seen a million times, and tried, in vain, to throw out.
“Tell you what what is like?”
“The sex.”
“Fuck you.” I halt my reach for the swing next to him. I cross my arms and feel the regret on my tongue.
“Can you just be honest with me for once? That was always your problem. You loved lying to me.” He is no longer trying to convince me I am worth saving, worth wanting back. I hear it. All the things he never had the brass to ask.
“No, I just couldn’t be myself with you.”
“You could. You just didn’t trust me enough to love you for who you were.”
“And whose fault is that? Yours or mine?” I really want to know, because I don't have the answer.
“That’s the question, isn’t it? The one I lose sleep over. The one you gave up trying to answer.”
“What was the point? Square peg, round hole.” We are too different. I always said that. When I was leaving, or trying to leave, letting him convince me to stay. I still believe it.
“You always loved using that phrase on me.”
“Because there is no truth I know more than that.”
