I know. I said this place was closed. But there’s something I needed closure on that I felt like I had to write. I needed catharsis. So there’s this.
My home is spacious enough for two. There’s an openness that allows the house to breathe, that spreads the natural light around, that makes for a warm, inviting aura. It is filled with pictures and books and comfortable furniture that invites one to sit down and stay awhile. There’s a fireplace, and lots of windows, and wood flooring and there’s always music playing. I longed for many years of my life to have a home this inviting, this aggressively pleasant. And I got it. I finally settled into the fact that I achieved something I set my heart on. Not just a house of my own, but a home.
But some time in 2020, the house shrunk. Its walls closed in. The air seemed stale, the natural light diminished. The floors buckled, the furniture trembled, the music stopped playing and the fire went out. It wasn’t sudden, this didn’t happen all at once. There was a gradual, barely perceptible shift in the foundation, one I didn’t really notice until my spacious house had turned into a small box in which the inhabitants were slowly withering away.
They say you don’t know what you had until it’s gone, and in much the same way, you sometimes don’t know what is happening until it’s over. And even then it may have been over before you knew it.
I had just come back from a pleasant drive where I met my Rhode Island sister at our halfway point in Connecticut to exchange some packages. This was in January, with Covid still raging, and we put on our masks and sat in our respective cars next to each other and talked until it was too cold to stay anymore. The ride home was nice, traffic free, and for most of the ride I daydreamed about the nap I was going to take when I got home.
I was just settling into the couch when my husband came in and sat opposite me, each of us in the same place where we spent most of the pandemic. I felt the air change as soon as he sat down and I knew there was bad news coming. Was it his father? He wasn’t well, and I thought for a moment he was going to break the news to me that his dad was dead.
“I want a separation.” His voice was soft, his eyes cast down. There was no introduction to the conversation, no padding of words. He just said the sentence as if it pained him to mouth those words, as if this was going to cause him more hurt than it would cause me.
We stared at each other. My heart sank, my stomach tied itself into an immediate knot, my entire body started to tingle, every sense gone into overdrive. I was stunned and scared and upset and yet in the back of my mind was a voice saying you always knew this day would come.
I asked him when he was leaving. He whispered now. He had a place ready. He moved his stuff out while I was laughing at my sister’s jokes in a Connecticut rest stop parking lot. Everything was gone already; he was the only thing left. My first thought was to physically grab him and hang onto him, tell him he can’t go, I won’t let him, I will not let fourteen years just be laid to waste.
“Ok.”
I remained on the couch. My real will to fight had left my body months ago, when the depression and anxiety were at their greatest. A great emptiness filled me then, my soul and my body yawning, drawing in almost a year of confinement, stillness, sadness, nothingness. I inhaled it all, allowed my lungs bloat. and then I let out a great exhale, my breath hot and heavy and carrying my despair on it.
“Ok.”
He left then, walked out the door with the promise of talking more about it after he’s had some space. I barely heard him. I wanted to tell him to wait, come back, what happened to the forever I was promised, but I couldn’t speak. I could only wait until I heard his car pull away before I cried.
About a year ago, we retreated to separate bedrooms. He said my snoring was keeping him awake, I told him the same. He said my habit of getting up at 4am was making him wake up too early. I told him his habit of watching tv well into the night kept me up too late. I didn’t know it then, but that was the beginning of our separation. He took his stuff to the guest room, I stayed in the big bedroom. I had the bed to myself. I was good with that. The first night, I slept soundly. We had set about making individual worlds for ourselves without realizing what we were doing and I wonder all the time if we were right to settle into those worlds without each other, if it wasn’t just what we wanted but what we needed.
He got sober in 2016. After several hospital stays and detox nightmares and near death experiences, he decided he was ready to get his life together again. He sought out AA, an organization that helped him the first time he got sober, before we were together. I was proud of him. I knew the first few months, even the first year, would be hard, and I vowed to do whatever I could to help him maintain his sobriety. All he wanted was for me to love him and stay with him, and I was more than happy to do both. I looked forward to resuming the life we had before he started drinking again in 2013. The adventures, the romance, the travel, the day to day living that made me think my life had finally turned into something grand.
The one meeting a day turned into two. The hour or so he’d be gone turned into three. Then he joined committees and started speaking at meetings and he’d be gone from dinner time until I was ready for bed. Weekends were in out and all day; meetings here, speaking there, getting together with the AA guys at the diner. It consumed him and in the process consumed our relationship. I started to feel unimportant. I withdrew a little. I sat on the couch a lot. I listened to The National’s “Apartment Story,” a song that used to make me smile, and I cried because the happy ending I wanted wasn’t coming. He was sober, but he was gone. I see that now. He was gone long before he said he was.
We never resumed our adventures or travel. He was living this social, fulfilling sober life and I felt so distanced from him. But I knew it was for good, I knew he was doing what he needed to do to keep from drinking. I had to weigh everything in two hands and the need for him to be sober always weighed more than anything I could hold in my other hand.
The pandemic has been hard on everyone in so many ways - no one I know came away unscathed. Lives upended, worlds changed. My depression and anxiety - things I had been able to keep under control with meds and therapy - were making themselves known in ways I couldn’t hide. I sunk deeper into the couch every day. I couldn’t read, didn’t feel like watching any movies or tv shows. I was starved for sports and starved for attention and I cried a lot. He’d put a mask on and go out to some clandestine AA meeting that wasn’t supposed to be happening and I’d sit there and listen to Julien Baker and wonder if life was ever going to get back to normal. I wasn’t even longing for a pre-pandemic normal. I wanted 2006-2012 back. I wanted those years where life seemed majestic, to those days where we got in the car and drove until we found somewhere to stop - a museum, a beach, a planting field. I wanted to go back to that night in Lake Tahoe where we watched the sunset and promised each other we’d live like this forever. I was deeply unhappy and I told no one.
The house started to feel small then, right when my resentment started sharpening itself. There was nowhere to go. No restaurants, no concerts, shopping only for necessities and only at 7:00 on Saturday morning when very few people were in the store. My beautiful, spacious home had become a place of confinement. Every day it felt like the ceiling was lowering down on me, the walls pushing in, the air becoming stale. I wondered what it would be like to just be alone, to let myself drown in my own existence, to never emerge from the couch again. Who would miss me. Who would care. I willed the house to collapse on itself with me in it.
I tried more than once to express my frustration and my sadness but I couldn’t find the words or the courage and I just let it go. I knew he was sad, too. I knew he wasn’t happy. I just didn’t know he was unhappy with us. Sometimes he would tell me he was depressed - something I already knew - and assure me that he would snap out of it, everything would be ok once he went back to client meetings in Manhattan. Everything would be ok, he said. But he knew it wouldn’t. He knew even then.
I’m at a safe distance of four months since he left. I’ve been able to look back with clear eyes and realize that voice in my head that always knew, that wasn’t shocked, was right. I always knew he was temporary, that my happiness was meant to be soaked up in the short term. But I refused to live with that in the forefront of my mind and I folded it up like a secret, stashed it away, and forgot about it until he uttered the words “I want a separation” with hurt in his voice as if I wronged him somehow. I’ve had time to sit with my feelings and sort them out and while the first month or two those feelings were mostly overwhelming sadness, other things grew out of that. The low lying resentment I’d been holding in came forward and asked to be recognized. Once I allowed that feeling to be known, to be loud and abundant, I began to crack through my depression and sadness. Each night alone became a night to feel free. Each day that passed without him became a day to answer to no one but myself. I made myself elaborate dinners he wouldn’t have appreciated. I watched all the sports I wanted to without feeling like I was dominating the television. I learned how to food shop for one. I learned how to be with myself without hating it. And I learned that I don’t have to be mad at him for doing what he needed to do to preserve his mental health, because in the process he preserved mine.
My daughter moved in temporarily with me a few weeks ago. She set herself up in the spare bedroom that was his and I told her to turn it into hers, to do what she wanted with it. I was tired of looking at that empty room, of being reminded that’s where his clothes used to hang. I was tired of walking in there just to torture myself, just to see if it still smelled like him. He’s gone now, exorcised out of existence within these walls.
I can sit on the couch now and not feel confined. The air is fresh again. The ceiling has lifted, the wall expanded, the light has come back. I can breathe for the first time in years. I really had no idea how bad things had become until I’ve looked back on them from this safe distance. We were stagnant. We had drifted so far apart we existed on different planes. I think about it now, I think about my reaction to his declaration, how that voice was there saying it knew. We had some great times, but in my life, great times are never meant to last.
I still love him. I always will. Fourteen years doesn’t go away like that. We haven’t even talked about divorce or what we’re going to do about the house. He’s still on my health insurance, and he still pays my car insurance. We text daily. I don’t resent him anymore, I just wish him happiness and hope he finds himself the way I’ve found myself over the past couple of months. I hope he figures out what he needs from life. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t us. And that’s gotta be ok.
I love this so much.
❤️