Clarity can come a in a place and time that are far removed from the events that required it. Imagine two people locked in a bad marriage had spent week in hostile silence. The man is skilled at weaponizing silence while the woman needs to talk like her life depended on it. It did not matter if that talk led to no outcomes and no closure. She had tried to make peace and failed many times during that fateful week - he simply refused to engage her no matter how much she groveled for a conversation. Came a point when she decided she was done and would no longer be the one seeking reconciliation - ever. She is that kind of woman - with a built in kill-switch no one can see. It makes her actions incomprehensible even to those who know her well because they too can't tell when that switch will go on. In this marriage, she was the one who had taken on the burden of keeping the precarious balance as he hacked away at the fragile foundation. This was a fool's errand but she had proven herself a fool to be in this situation.
Yet finality can be a terrifying thing. The silence and loneliness that came with her decision to emotionally disengage even more so. The house they had bought together in this very uneasy union felt even bigger and emptier. The endless cycles of loud discord followed by begging for peace had given way to a quiet eeriness. She remembered the day they first spoke, the dreams she first dreamed of them together - a real family, a companion for life. At the end of the coldest week of their marriage, she found herself looking at this man as a badly broken human being that needed to be rescued before it was too late. If only it were only possible to slip by his side, naked and hold him with all of her- her full womanhood. Kiss him on the lips and take away all the pain, bitterness and suffering of the past three years, the disappointments of his life that went much further, magically make things whole for the man she once thought would be the one for her. Inhale life back into this wasteland of marriage, make love and feel close once again.
She realized they were both alone and suffering with no one to turn to. She resented her lover on days like this because he did not experience pain like hers - he still has a somewhat normal family that she did not. Sometimes her resentment peaked and she feel like the kept woman that she was not - there was absolutely no deception in their relationship. Neither side had misrepresented the facts of their lives. She pushed her lover away from anger and he sensed that. She wished he would stop loving her because that love could hurt just as much as the lack of it in her marriage. She had herself up in this dense mesh of knots that know no untangling - they run through her marriage, her past before that, an unknown future with a man who might one day become something more than a lover who she meets secretly.
Her home is weighed down by the heaviness of unexpressed anger and pain. The night before, it floated up from the basement in physical waves and wore her out. She was not able to sleep. Maybe this is how guilt feels. She has a lover, there are others in her life she can share things with - he has no one else. He is not the kind to have a lover - that would be too much emotional work for him. The sports channel was all he had capacity left for after being married to this woman. Everything started to fall apart with her within a month - decades of work he had done on himself was undone in a few weeks. She was everything he could want in a wife and yet being married to her was the worst mistake of his life.
Before they were married, this union promised perfection in every way, he mistook that for feeling love for her. He is estranged from family and those that were once his closest friends. To his wife, he has become unreachable now - something has snapped that cannot make him or them whole again. The people that once made up his world are no longer welcome there - he does want their concern or pity for how his life has fallen apart. Her heart breaks for him, but there are no ways left to help him anymore. She cannot recall having hurt for anyone as much as she hurts for him. If this does not mean she loves him, she does not know what does. Somehow the realization that she loves this man despite their marriage being on fire, all the hurt and pain he has caused her, all the dreams and promises he broke was terrifying for her. It made her wonder about her lover - if she truly loved him or was merely intoxicated by sex that gave her closeness she craved for her marriage. Talking of love was so easy once.
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