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Wednesday, July 1, 2009

The Beginning

Yesterday my wife said she does not love me anymore. Then later on she said she does. The reason she said she did not love me was that I had forgotten to do something. I have already forgotten what I forgot, but specifics don't seem important. To me, anyway.

Well, it's really not that I forgot to do one thing, but that I forget to do most everything. I guess the frustration builds up.

She says she is tired of dealing with MS. That makes two of us. But here again my own fatigue is beside the point.

I can't deal with this anymore, she says, I can't deal with raising two children. Sasha (our 9 year old) will grow up, but you just keep growing down!

What can I say? How true, how true.

What can I do other than identify with her frustration? What can I do other than to agree that she would be best off without me?

What does she mean by I don't love you anymore? Isn't she really just talking about the man she married as opposed to the stranger she is now stuck with?

It seems that women use words differently from men. In her mind, on her tongue, love and hate are somehow able to play at mutual inclusiveness, contradictions become concepts rather than absurdities. Expression is a matter belonging to the moment, not to eternity.

I feel, therefore I speak, she says.

And I think, therefore I am.

I remember walking one time in the park with my second wife. We had been married some 12 years at that point, and things had been going downhill. It was hard to get her out of the house, it was hard to get her to talk. It was hard to get her to do anything at all other than sit on the couch with her laptop, lost to our family in games and chat rooms.

As we came down the hill, our dogs trailing behind, she turned to me and said I don't think I'm in love with you anymore.

Deja vu, right?

What was she saying, really? She was saying she missed the romance, the newness. She was saying she missed the sparks and fireworks of courtship. She was saying she missed being young, missed being thin, missed the flirtations of men, missed having a choice. In cyberspace she gazed hours on end at the reflection of the world--a different world, a world of dreams and possibilities.

I knew all this, and comprehended according to the patterns of the world. And yet deep down it stuck with me, those words, after so many years, I don't think I'm in love with you . . . Deep down, where things are judged and discerned according to the most rudimentary laws of living, the words themselves nested and remained.

I think of that now as the true beginning of the end.

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