I was crying partly because I felt that this was expected of me, partly from genuine repentance, but partly also because of a deeper grief which is peculiar to childhood and not easy to convey: a sense of desolate loneliness and helplessness, of being locked up not only in a hostile world but in a world of good and evil where the rules were such that it was actually not possible for me to keep them. Happy 40th birthday, R—–!
Day two of the grand excursion, away from the comforts of our temporary home. Our garden…
The morning wander up the old route to BatW for a coffee and muffin, and post-coffee wander down the main drag again. It’s impossible to do this without being reminded of those strange and difficult months between traveling around the world and deciding what came next after traveling around the world, when this walk up and back (or bike ride up and back) was the immutable morning ritual, often to be followed for me by the trip onwards to the library, ostensibly to carry out research into various potential career options. Those were strange times; how strange they were is evident in the way they turned out: the move up the coast to a place we knew little about, where we knew no one, and where we had no jobs or obvious prospects thereof.
This separation from my adored husband is the longest we have experienced since we started living together in 1998 after the long-distance grad-school years. I miss him so much that it’s almost like I don’t miss him — as though the cognitive cave-in brought on by his absence erases him, as PTSD makes certain memories inaccessible because too painful. The pain of missing him manifests itself more as a general malaise rather than as pining over specific feelings or memories, so that I have to remind myself at times why I don’t feel complete or fully well.
Also I notice that I am getting randy. Not surprising, but pretty annoying. I wandered back up and down the main drag in the afternoon, more for something to do than for any other reason (although I also needed to grab some provisions for tomorrow’s flight), stopping off on the way back to pick up a gift for R—– at the comic book shop. The guy who sold me the thing was so handsome, and he seemed so lonely stuck in there all on his own on such a nice day, and we got to talking, and a part of me certainly contemplated making him an oblique offer or at least let him know that there is someone who finds him beautiful… I’m a sucker for those hazel eyes…
And I speak as one who is completely committed to my lifelong partnership with a thoroughly adorable and gorgeous man when I say that, nonetheless, there are times when I find myself peering over the ridges into the other grooves, and wondering how those ones would have turned out. What if I was the kind of person who could walk into a shop and start picking someone up just like that? Do things like that still happen? I can’t see me being like that, but that makes it an interesting mental exercise: if that was how I was living in my sex life, what else would be different?
So many paths, and we walk one only. No sense pining for the ones we’re not on.
