I’m an anniversaries kind of guy. History major. Names, dates, places, and times. I have a theory about time being a geographical function because of the orbit of the world and subscribe to the more common theory that places are charged with something meaningful, that they get stamped and imprinted by the events thereon, always to carry the legacy of that occurrence into the future, which itself is just a repetition of geographical paths already tread. This explains what people sometimes mistake for ghosts or that spectral ooky spine-tingly feeling when they go somewhere that inspires that.
Coming up on a real doozy in the next 24 hours here. A year ago today was the last full day I spent with my wife, Emily, before she flew away a year ago tomorrow, before I took her to the John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City with her friend Amy and she flew away and never loved me in person again. Before she left, after I left them at the airport but before the plane took off, she called me to say the following:
And was gone. It would be sixty more days before she decided that she didn’t love me anymore, sixty days of deep yearning missing loving important conversations that I wish I’d recorded as a bulwark against the creeping feeling that I have somehow become a crazy person in the midst of all this. As though my very sensory perceptions were what was betraying me instead of my wife. Granted, I’d had an experience with that before that makes me especially susceptible to this kind of thing, but still. This is not a thing one can just live with very easily without questioning whether the world is just as bad as the worst people say it is, that this whole thing is somehow a test.
Which prompts one of the most irrational (objectively) and yet compelling feelings to strike in the last few days and hours – that somehow tomorrow someone will pop out of a cake or drop down with their movie cameras or come out from behind a curtain and reveal that I’ve been punked, that it’s all farce, that I’ve somehow survived a year and don’t have to put up with this nonsense anymore, this idea that someone can just make a mistake and react so violently to their own action as to cast aside every prior incarnation of their self-perception. That of course that doesn’t happen and you somehow kept it together for 365 days after and now here’s your prize and let’s all go watch it on video while Emily sits by your side and waits for you to forgive her for this monstrously poor-taste over-extended joke so you can get back to your life.
Of course, in this theory, it would probably require waiting till the 19th of July of this year, or maybe a week after that. And pretty soon we can make bargains for 3 or 5 years. This is how people go crazy, how people just flat lose it. Cognitive dissonance, not unlike that which most likely inspired her own psychic break with the past in the wake of her simple human mistake. People can snap like that, but they can also bargain themselves to death, move the bar further and further toward oblivion until one day it’s over the edge. None of this is comforting.
And yet all the alternatives feel like pure submission, pure acquiescence to the things that were done, without resistance. It’s something of this desire not to submit that leaves unsigned insipid yellow-flagged papers on my desk to this moment, the ironically cruel brand of “Legal Solutions Plus” stamped beneath each one. I know obscenity when I see it. It’s like an atrocity, this stack of monochrome sheets that bear my name, but no resemblance to anything I can recognize. I am finding it hard to breathe, now, as I type this.
I can point to the problems, I can articulate and feel them, I can even anticipate the cascading catastrophes stemming from being so open and public about these feelings here and now. Who could ever love me when witnessing this documentation that I may spend the rest of my life waiting for my first wife to pop out from behind the curtain and yell “Surprise!”? Who could ever take the incredible risk and sacrifice that devotion to me would require when I am this damaged? The odds of viability start to decline precipitously on a course especially perilous in light of my own conviction that only love can heal me. And even “heal” seems like a naive word to cite, maybe “patch up” is better or even “stop the bleeding”, the arterial floodgates that seem to be spewing in every direction.
And why now? Is it just the anniversary that makes me dwell, to almost bask in the pain of all this memory and ache? There is an element, of course, but it has much more to do with the separation, the commitment to stay away in word and deed, to take a break so that I may actually acclimate to a life without this person. And that, of course, in cutting off communication, there is a sudden rekindling of all that was lost in the first place, a sudden second death to follow the first, for there is no longer even the illusion of connection, no matter how painful and abusive the frail fires of friendship were over the last year. And of course with that a release, also, for me to open up about what I’m feeling, to not feel censored or bridled by having to talk to her about it in a day or a week, to not be further admonished for making one more unforeseeable mistake in a chain of history rewritten with me as the villain.
And I’m thinking of spending this night, the one-annum marker from the last night of my life I truly spent with my wife, in Princeton? Listening to someone sing about heartbreak? What is wrong with me?
What isn’t wrong with me?
