So.
I’ve been home for 5 minutes. The phone rings.
It’s Red. She’s locked her keys in her trunk at school. Can I come and bring her the spares I still have?
I want to say no. I want to say, This is what your AAA membership is for, and I have guests coming over, and oh, yeah, I’ve been avoiding you all day because a year ago last night you said you were leaving me, and I cried and I begged and we talked and you said you’d give me another chance, and a year ago today I came home at lunch time to find you still curled up in bed barely aware of your surroundings you were so depressed like you’d been when I left that morning, and I had to tear my damn soul in half and tell you that if this was the cost of your staying, you should go, so I’d really rather not see you right now.
But I don’t say those things. I put a note in the window for my guests, and I get in the car. And when I get there, she’s all teary, having been almost hysterical, afraid that something bad had happened somehow, and she wants a hug, so I give her one, trying not to smell her hair or feel her pressed against me. And I walk her to her car, and I hold her hand on the way, because she wants to, and every step echoes thousands of others taken holding her hand. And I listen as she talks about sitting inside the building just now remembering sitting there waiting for me to pick her up after class and then talking to me about what she’d learned in class that day, while I try very hard not to think about those things.
And then she says she didn’t appreciate my listening enough, even though she knows she rambled on about some very uninteresting things, and I get an impulse to say that it’s OK, because I didn’t appreciate you telling me those things enough, but I don’t, because I’m afraid my voice will crack and I’ll lose what little control I still have.
So we get to her car and she opens the trunk, and I can feel her start to panic because she can’t see the keys from where she is, but they’re just under something, so I grab them and give them to her, and she gives me that look, where for just a moment it feels like I’ve lifted the weight of the world from her shoulders.
And for just a half second, I forget.
But then I remember.
She wants to go out and do something, and part of me wants to take her up on it, to sit and talk and be with her and see….
But I don’t. I tell her I have to get back home because folks might be waiting. Like always, I want to kiss her goodbye. She tears up, I tear up, and I wrench myself away. Like always, when I think she can’t hear, I whisper I love you because I still do.
It’s supposed to stop hurting isn’t it? People always act like it stops hurting eventually. Are they just pretending?