“When two people part it is the one who is not in love who makes the tender speeches.”
–In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust
I still think that my husband knew at the airport. Maybe he was thinking about Paris five years earlier, remembering how I’d call late at night from my dorm room at the Sorbonne around the time he would be leaving work in the States. Back then, I couldn’t wait to talk to him. But even that summer had its sour moments—wet leaves would get swept into loose piles in the boulevards and when the lovers drew close on the Left Bank it would leave me cold and hopeful for something of my own that was then only loosely defined. My loneliness was a persistent thing even then. I was incurable in my desperate need to understand my own heart. There was a consistent need to examine, examine, and examine. I would sometimes watch planes from the top of the Pompidou Center and try to make out what distance was doing to us both.
But even at the moment he proposed a year later, it felt more like a relief or a confirmation of something I could analyze and formally present to others around me rather than to simply celebrate the idea of fully being with someone I was really devoted to. That is, my brain was involved in the answer, the yes, I will marry you rather than my heart, which should have been bouncing around like a superball in a glass arena. The trouble? I was twenty-three-years old and thought it was okay not to feel myself consumed with passion, or dizzy with happiness like a new fiancé should be. Of course, all this is easy enough to evaluate and dissect after so much time has passed. At the time, I was already thinking about the wedding day logistics. I was thinking about my last name changing. I was thinking of wedding dates, locations, and the word wife and how it would soon apply to me. I wasn’t really focusing on the most important thing, the deceptively simple question of whether or not this person was really the one for me.
Fast forward a few years and the fights (predictably common, domestic) have snowballed and I find myself a woman unswitched, out of love, and what’s worse, out of reasons. How did it all begin? Can I pinpoint the beginning of the end?
I can. It was at the Denver International Airport, around July 31st, 2010. I was at baggage claim, just returned from a month-long writer’s conference in Mexico.
When you see someone you are supposed to love and realize you no longer love this person it is like walking into your closet and finding it empty. You wonder if you are crazy. You try flipping the switch on and off, but nothing. Are you even in the right house? You start to ask yourself things like this.
Well, I finally accepted that I was in the right place. I could recall the architecture, the scaffolding that had done a rough job at holding us up for so many years was still visible, but I could hear the wind in the bones of it, there was something hollow to it. I barely knew how to get from room to room, but there I was. In this empty house I’d never imagined, vacant closets, and no laughter.
Getting off the plane I think I’ll be honest with him.
I take an escalator to baggage claim recalling my first grade teacher telling the class honesty is the best policy, but isn’t this different? Surely that rule doesn’t apply to everything, not when honesty is just plain, shitty honesty. We are all just going to hurt each other thinking that way, I tell myself.
Thought One: This isn’t happening, is it?
Thought Two: How hard would it be to just pretend?
Thought Three: Pretending is what got me here in the first place….
In this scene I am in the airport holding a red suitcase, and my red backpack is strapped to me. Everything feels heavier now and I try to remember what I bought that weighs so much. My thoughts are more disconnected than usual. I know he will be there any minute, and I want to say something that isn’t a lie. I imagine myself an actress running into his arms, bursting like I ought to be after not having seen him for a month, but the freakish truth was that I didn’t feel like doing any of it. I was already rehearsing the I-Can’t-Do-This-Anymore- speech without knowing I was rehearsing it.
Still, I wondered if acting in love would make me be in love.
I was desperate to go back and correct the architecture, to re-do the scaffolding, and get the place furnished, like it was supposed to be. Right then, I really wanted to remember how to get around that house, how to get the light back on, but that’s only because I was scared to death. I knew I needed to turn the key in, but could I do that?
I spot him near the escalators searching the crowd. I remembered how I’d wanted to run hard at him, to pronounce the word Love, to be dramatic, but my feet aren’t moving. Instead of warm, I feel cold. So cold I realize I’m shivering.
Our eyes lock, and I don’t move. I realize I would be a terrible actress. Then I remember something and realize that maybe I wouldn’t fail at acting after all. I swallow hard and prepare for speech. I realize I’ve been holding onto my suitcase and standing with my backpack on the whole time, just waiting to be found, totally petrified by the prospect of what the next hour may bring. I shift my weight from one foot to the other. He walks faster.
I say something like it’s just so good to see you because I think that’s not totally a lie, but the neon word LIES goes off in my brain. I close my eyes to block out the image, but it’s still there—big and blinding LIES.
What are you doing?
I hug him, hoping he didn’t see the word, too. We back away from each other and our eyes meet. At this point I say nothing, which I know is wrong and unthinkable, but I keep imagining myself a shore, and he is a shore and an ocean is crashing against both of us. Nothing is sticking; everything is in flux. Language is somewhere in that water I want to stop and the only way to find words is for the water to leave me with the right shells and the shells are language. I think, Let there be an I missed you on the sand, a love, or at least an it’s been way too long. Let me find something here. But everything is blank. The beach and my mouth are failures. My husband is a beige coast. The water in my brain rushes in and out. I see myself see myself. I wait and try, but the water leaves me with nothing.
When he asks if he can carry something, I reply no, it’s fine. I tell him I am used to the weight by now. I tell him it makes me strong.
See how fine everything is?
By this point it’s really late at night and we’ve left the airport and are now driving around, lost in Denver. Words like separation and divorce start making appearances in our conversation. I tell him I didn’t want to have to say I don’t love him anymore, because that’s cruel. It’s too cruel. And yeah, I stopped caring and no I didn’t miss him while I was gone, and maybe I should have emailed more, but I cannot be the one to say I don’t love you anymore.
But that’s it, isn’t it?
Yes, I whisper.
Everything gets very quiet and I start to notice how many streetlights are out.
The outcome starts to feel inevitable after being so honest. I wonder if he’d been anticipating this ending all along. Did he look at me and see logistics, endless rows and columns? Did he see lines brackets, and numbers where my body was? Where the fireworks were supposed to be? Had he known I was some insolvable problem all along, doomed to be laid away?
In the quiet, I let him make some wrong turns. It’s late, past midnight now, and we are still in that unfamiliar city. As he drives the wrong way, I stare at my reflection in the window and the decision covers me like a mask. I start pinning labels on my forehead. I’d thought I was lonely before, but now I’m really lonely. Sometimes I can hear him crying. I tell him where to turn to get us home, and he seems grateful. I look down at my hands and think they look like they are holding onto each other. I want to open my hands, but I can’t. They keep holding on.
Why won’t my hands open?
When we get to the apartment, he drives around looking for a parking space. The space we eventually find is far away. The car stops, and I sit there clutching a tissue, the sounds of my husband’s sobs still ringing in my ear. I wonder how anyone could want me this much. I wonder how it’s possible I don’t want someone who wants me this much. I watch him turn the car off and touch his eyes and he asks me if I am getting out. My hands finally come apart and on cue, I answer him.
***
Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.
27 responses
Wow, awesome. I’m dying to know what happened next!
simply beautiful and heart wrenching….more?
Beautifully written.
@Rob: She gets out.
What kills me in this piece is the sound of her husband crying. It reminds me–in style, not content, obviously–of Lolita’s words being quoted by Humbert as he tells his story, her experience and loss filtered only through his narrative. Similarly, here, we know that something truly heartbreaking is happening on the other side, but can only see it in shadow, or rendered in glimpses through the narrator’s own experience. It’s gorgeously done, authentic, and so sad.
Beautiful. So eerily familiar, the moment when you realize you can no longer pretend.
I can relate yet could never put it into such words.
Beautiful piece ~ you got me, I cried. So real and so palpable. Great writing, very on the bone. Hope this is part of a larger piece we can one day buy at the bookstore. I know, I’ll be buying it.
Beautifully told. And thank you.
But this worries me. Couldn’t the relationship have been salvaged? Most couples fall out of love, but continue to love each other—-otherwise, no one would stay together. They could have tried to break routine in some way….
It’s a very sad piece.
Starkly open, honest, self-aware.
The words sketch the conditional nature of relationships in our romantic age. For many of our world marriage requires that a couple maintain a “magic” that one continues to feel the thrill of rediscovery and renewed commitment with each season with their other.
Few intimate relationships achieve this gold standard. Few ever did.
The nature of our species is that most of us experience ebbs and flows of feeling. Those ebbs and flows used to be wrapped up in a box of the social expectation that “… until death do us part” referred to physical death, hot the death of desire.
For some couples the old box provided discipline and structure that forced them to stick-it-out, to weather the bad times, to repress one’s own feelings for appearances and for children. For other couples permanent marriage became a sentence of loneliness and fulfillment for life-without-parole.
The last forty years have shifted our social expectations in a revolutionary way. In our brave new world we’re forever searching for our place, questioning our connections, and living in the now. One size no longer fits all.
For some that brings disappointment and tears. Others find that their soul is emancipated. Whether one offers tender speeches or is condemned to listen, transitions are painful.
Wow, that last comment (@Mark Miller) strikes me as just as powerful and important as the piece. Thank you both.
This was beautiful and sad and so real. To the commenters who think they should have worked it out: you haven’t been there.
It almost seems too easy though. To be the one loved less is horrible.
What is perfect about this is that it acknowledges what is an extraordinarily painful realization: not “we were once in love, and it faded”, but “I never really loved this person at all and I am just waking up”.
Some people fall in love and marry. Some of us, though, fall into a relationship that has some of the surface trappings of love, but deep down the motivation is something else: fear, or loneliness, or compulsion, or running away, or a desire for some kind of normalcy that seems to otherwise escape us. And so we lie to ourselves without even knowing that we’re lying to ourselves.
And then, as Tasha describes, it’s like a house with a fundamentally broken foundation. You can paint over the cracks in the walls, you can shim up the furniture that wobbles on the tilted floors, you can deal with the doors that stick in the crooked doorways. You tell yourself little lies, you squash down parts of yourself, but then the little lies become big lies, the little arguments become big arguments, the attractive delusion that got you into this rots away, leaving only resentment and regret, and the regret metastasizes into anger, and the house starts falling down all on its own.
And then there’s nothing left to do but tear it down and start over.
It takes a huge amount of courage to do this, to know that you’re dying inside and the only way you will be able to live is to hurt this person who once thought you loved them. You put your fist through windows because you don’ know where to put the anger, you throw up in the morning trying to muster up the courage, and every year it gets harder and harder.
To wake up after five years and no kids is awful. To wake up after twenty years and two kids who think their parents love each other…hell.
I think this may be the best thing I have ever read on The Rumpus.
What gets lost, as we descend into discussions of marriage and societal expectations and so on, is the piece’s language. It’s one thing to present a heart-rending true story; to present it with a frequently lyrical sensibility, to take an already powerful sequence and give it the poet’s loving touch, is another altogether.
Granted, the emotional content is compelling, but its strength rests largely on lines like “I look down at my hands and think they look like they are holding onto each other.” Therein lies the transcendence from anecdote to artistic narrative. That’s the tough part. Well done.
I’ve been consumed myself lately about how I’m supposed to break up with my partner. She moved to a new city with me when I got a new job and I’ve been trying to come to terms with the fact that I just know this isn’t right. She hasn’t done anything wrong, but when it’s not there it’s just not there. And yet I can’t seem to pull the trigger.
This piece just haunted me and made me feel so much less alone in what I know I have to do. Thank you.
This was July, and you’re divorced already? Really?
I hope by ignoring a lack of love for years you didn’t do irreperable damage to your own ability to trust yourself to know your feelings. It sounds like your ex may have been living in his emotions better, and may recover relatively soon.
(Not that this strikes a chord or anything…)
I’m here, and it’s terrifying. Thank you for letting me know that this coldness isn’t unique to me.
Ultimately, he’ll be better off. And so will the writer. Most marriages shouldn’t have happened. Most people shouldn’t get married at all, or even think of it. Most human beings are not equipped by biology to be with one person for their entire life. We are moving towards a point in which, thankfully, the culture has begun to reconcile with this reality of biology and physics.
For those who can pull it off, though, kudos.
I agree with Chuck about marriage. I also think that the idea that “the one” is out there somewhere is absurd (in a population of 6+billiion, only one? really?).
Regarding this piece specifically, I hope this is just a work of fiction. Either way, the author says it all early on: ” I was incurable in my desperate need to understand my own heart.”. If she had told him that to in the beginning, he would’ve known from the start that she would always be more concerned with her ideas about what love is “supposed” to feel like than with actually loving someone. Self-aware? No. Self-involved? Yes. Even her thoughts about how to tell him are all about her (with just enough handwringing to ease her social conscience – she knows she’s still going to leave him, so there’s no real long-term risk to her). Or maybe she’s just too young, inexperienced, or lacks the empathy to know that there is no “easy” way to let someone know you’ve been lying to them from the start.
For those of you commenting on here that you are in a similar situation, please grow a pair (metaphorically speaking), take responsibility that YOU are no longer bringing yourself to the relationship, and let the other person get on with their life. Or CHOOSE to bring yourself to the relationship, stop living in a fantasy of “perfect love” or “the perfect relationship” and get related to the person, the human being (not your concept of him/her). You might be pleasantly surprised, if you allow yourself to be.
This story reminded me why I despise everyone I’ve ever been in a relationship with. If you can’t be in a relationship (and nobody whose mind moves in these self-obsessed circles can be), don’t ruin other people’s lives by telling them you love them. You don’t; you love the way they make you feel about yourself.
Life is always so simple and clear-cut for the righteous. “Do this! Don’t do that! It’s obvious!”
The rest of us muddle through the best we can. We make mistakes, we hurt others, we get hurt ourselves. We don’t yell “liar!” at strangers, because we don’t claim zealous ownership of the truth.
“Growing a pair” is rarely a sufficient solution for a problem of any real depth or complexity. Unless you’re approaching the whole thing with all the wisdom and perspective of your average 19-year-old boy.
One can criticize the piece (or the ideas presented within it) without “claiming zealous ownership of the truth.” Particularly painful to read was the simile “my heart, which should have been bouncing around like a superball in a glass arena.” The narrator was 23, which even in this age of protracted adolescence (23 is the new 16?)is old enough to know that love is not this fuzzy feeling that one gets at the end of, say, a ridiculous romance like Jerry Maquire. That doesn’t mean lie, pretend, or live a life without parole to meet one’s promises. It could mean being honest. The piece uses that word repeatedly, and yet I was left with a feeling that the narrator’s sadness was hollow and that the previous comment about “the wisdom and perspective of your average 19 year old” might be more accurately used to describe the narrator of the story.
But hey, the piece attracted some attention and discussion so it must be doing something right…
Well, I’m 46, I was married for almost 20 years, and I identified with every word she wrote. I kinda don’t get where the “grow a pair” vitriol is coming from; seems to me she did exactly what you suggest, she faced up to the lie of the relationship and ended it, despite the hurt it caused both of them. She wrote honestly and painfully about the confusion and self-doubt that surrounds a person in that situation, and people who aren’t in her shoes tell her she should have done it this way, or that way, or not at all.
The air of moral certainty that’s been cropping up in the Rumpus comments the past couple of weeks is rubbing me the wrong way, I guess. At least I perceive it that way; it’s always possible I’m projecting my own baggage onto it, but I thought Tasha’s piece was honest and real and beautiful.
I, too, am bothered by the moral absolutism displayed by some of the comments here. The commenters claim to despise self-involved people in relationships, but they themselves are allowed to be self-absorbed enough to believe their experiences or theories are right for everyone else.
I’m watching two relationships now (both about to marry), where the women have “perfect” guys. There isn’t a thing wrong with them that they can find. Something just isn’t there. They aren’t trying to find something wrong with them. They’re trying to figure out what’s wrong with themselves. Why can’t they feel absolutely certain that these guys are the right ones? Why can’t they calm down that the guys aren’t going to figure out how imperfect they are? You can have everything in the relationship going for you, but if you can’t be comfortable in that relationship 100%, it’s not going to work. It WILL become cause for concern shortly after you marry.
We’ve all had relationships like this. If you haven’t, then you’re not being honest with yourself. People can be perfect for you on paper. They can treat you like the sun shines out of your orifices, but if you don’t feel it, it isn’t going to last. I’ve been on both sides of the coin here. I wish an ex-boyfriend had been more honest with me, but I had a subsequent relationship where I couldn’t be honest enough with myself or him about how it was perfect but I didn’t feel it.
We’re human. We make mistakes, we experiment. When people can stop projecting their theories about how relationships SHOULD be, we will finally get to the human element of the whole thing. You should never force something to fit that you know in your gut doesn’t. Telling people to “man up” or “grow a pair” just shows how immature your own experiences and thought processes are.
I have no comment about relationships in general, but I really did love this piece. Heartbreaking and honest.
People who go into relationships like sails blown away at the mercy of a rough wind… show that they have not grown up emotionally. That feeling of “finally my life is meaningful” should ring alarm bells. This way of seeing relationships as an “answer” stems from personal issues that have not been let go, from childhood maybe? Where people look for answers to their own conflicts in other people instead of in themselves. So when they get the attention they didn’t get or the emotional support they always craved they really don’t appreciate it cause they are no longer “that child”. They aren’t fulfilled because what they think they want is no longer really what they want, they are adults carrying memories of long lost desires or traumas/fears/etc, which no longer apply to their present reality.
I agree with people here that say that we have a very skewed perception of love. “It’s just not there” sound like “hoccus poccus” to me. That means people just don’t know what’s wrong. And really they don’t have to know… but once you hurt someone else, I believe there is another factor within the conflict, responsibility. That’s why we are adults, we are supposed to work things out in ourselves without hurting others. Then work them out with those who we have CHOSEN to be with us. What happens when we realize we didn’t know our self and we chose someone for the wrong reasons? Do we just let go and say, “oh well too bad, deal with it, bye bye now”. There is where commitment comes in, and this commitment is the real love, where we are committed to working things out and exploring ourselves separately, but PARALLEL to our partner. This I would say is the “worse” to which our marriage vows refer to.
I believe that a truly mature person can fall in love multiple times and forever (with an infinite amount of personae) and still not be scarred by the events or decisions taken within the relationships, even if terrible, because this person understands that all that is said and done is nothing more than an interesting thought that occurs. Observe and let go. Learn. To people who truly believe that there is something that is supposed to be “there”, open your eyes, there is nothing, it’s all in our heads. When you are ready to commit do so, otherwise don’t and you will be happier. Be honest with yourself.
I like your style and the way you wrote the piece (by the way).
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