It’s July. After the dreaded 4th, when a year ago my husband had just returned from having an affair and I didn’t know it but I knew it, and just days away from the date I refuse to even type though it’s burned in my brain, the date that a year ago I found their list of reasons to be together. A categorized list of secrets that had been kept from me. The true answers to questions I’d already asked and had been lied to in response. Four pages of ways to ruin my life. And my daughter’s.
My body remembers and I’ve been dreading this particular anniversary for months, though the dread will probably be worse than the reality.
Because I’m not sure how much I care, anymore.
I’m in my bed in Portland, Oregon, two-thousand miles from the bed where I slept a year ago. The bed where I sat and read the words that would change my life, the words that took away everything I thought I knew and gave me the truth instead.
Words that drowned me, I thought, but then I came up for air, baptized.
Truth is all we need.
This bed is new. I left that one behind. Who would want it. He bought a new frame for it after I moved out - dark and modern and cheap. It looks like a bachelor’s bed, belonging in a basement or a cave, all wrong for the bright cottage room. Not that he’d ever notice.
This bed, my new bed, no man has been here. I haven’t been kissed yet. I haven’t been held. I haven’t been touched. Through the window I can see the neighbor’s patio lights glowing in a line from their house to their tree, and overhead is a canopy of branches stretching from our huge pine. How old might it be, I wonder? I watch the last bits of light bleed from the sky between pages of Maggie Smith.
My book light is too bright but it doesn’t go any lower.
I think about when we got here a few months ago, Isla and I. It was the very end of March, cold and rainy and gray and green. We flew in from South Carolina where we’d been staying at my parents’ house, where I’d remotely signed my divorce papers at the city hall standing across the counter from a notary, where I’d begun a new long-distance relationship with an old boyfriend, where I began to heal, if such things have beginnings.
Isla and I landed here and took a car to our Airbnb, eleven or so suitcases and bags in tow, none of which could she carry. In the first week, we bought a car, started looking at houses to rent, took a ton of cold rainy walks, applied for a house, started her in preschool, and got the house. I cried a lot for the first time in all of this. The second week, we moved in, had our packed-up belongings delivered and unloaded, slept and shivered on an air mattress as we awaited a bed, ate our meals on the front porch sitting on a mat, went to Ikea many times, unpacked and unpacked and unpacked, and I cried a bunch more.
Looking back, I actually have no idea how I survived those first few weeks. So much change, so many decisions, an immense amount of physical and emotional work. A little over three months in now and that feels as far away as the rest of it does. Almost. I didn’t just walk the bridge that connected my old life to the new; I built it as I went.
The sky is as dark as it gets now, the tree branches just half a shade darker. The patio lights still glow.
My mind turns from the past to the future. The soon. Colt is coming here, the former boyfriend who is my boyfriend once again.
It’s been over five years since we’ve seen each other. I haven’t been in the same room with him since before I was married, before I became a mother, before I remade my life into this. I emailed him the week that my divorce papers were done being edited and were ready to be signed. I’d wanted to for months and for many reasons I waited, and for as many reasons I sent an email finally on March 1st. Was he interested in talking, I asked, simply. He was, very much so.
I don’t think either of us expected to realize we were still in love. No, again. No, still.
I suspected I was. But I didn’t expect it to be… this.
Our relationship these months has developed into the most beautiful, supportive, exciting, loving, and strong relationship I’ve ever experienced.
When I said I haven’t been held, I meant that only physically. I am held in a way I’ve never been before. I’m allowing myself to be held in a way I’ve never allowed before. I said to him last night, “I’m still getting used to being this loved.”
He loves me the same way I love myself. I don’t know why for so long I thought I couldn’t have that.
And now, reader, he’ll be here in just a few weeks, to live here in Portland.
In a few months it’ll get darker earlier. The air will cool and the rain will begin. I’ll lay here in this bed wrapped in him. We’ll wonder together how old is the pine tree outside the window.
July is a faded memory.