The words we held spoke clearer then, on the couch miles apart. Our eyes turned inward unable to see the bliss which so enraptured us in the months before when valiantly broad words such as‘forever’ and ‘love’ and ‘I do’ rang joyously from our ready to speak mouths. But then on the couch, as far apart as strangers strangely aware of intimate knowledge of each other, then encased in silent defiance, not so much. The both of us there in the moment okay with undoing the sacred us. We’ve been married nearly five months.
She’d never been a wife or mother before. I’d never been married again before.
Independence dies slowly at the hand of a hesitant love.
I couldn’t understand her frustration with me and my lack of initiative in areas that I didn’t value in the same way she did. After all, I was busy with a growing to-do list at work, a book being readied to release, managing the projected idea of me always being okay, friends that I couldn’t keep up with and daughters still wrestling with too much change in too little time. I am a freight train rushing headlong into dreams pushing against the rails that hold me on course, and she can’t understand that? She can’t empathize with the pressure I put on myself and my lack of time to get some things done?
She’s a strong woman whose chest houses a heart burning to love and unafraid of taking on too much. Her shoulders are stronger than they should be. With a delicate touch she came into us caught up in our own little adventure just as she always belonged. No one small could’ve done so. She’s not small at all; her heart swallows it all – love and pain.