Destruction

I just found out that someone else I know is getting separated from her husband. She just moved into her own place clear on the other side of town and everything. How many couples my age does that make? Three? Four? No, five, maybe. Six! I’m losing count. And I’m not even thirty yet.

There was a time, like maybe two years ago, when this would have given me a little threatening needle-prick, this would’ve gotten my hackles up. You know, as a married person who publicly is so sure of herself, and her rock-solid marriage. But since then I’ve seen that being married isn’t about being rock-solid at all. I’m not still married because I’m good at it.

Now I’m just sad. I don’t feel separate, like just like my friends are splitting up; I feel like a cookie being eaten. I wonder if my friends and family are a representative sample. I wonder if half of the people I know who get married will split up,

like America.

first day

I was like a nervous mommy today. Only mommies don’t make their kids four-egg omelettes…well, maybe their teenagers. Nervous wife…only I’m not nervous, really…my guts are full of butterfly promise. Ben usually makes breakfast for me, but today I stuffed him with an omelette, apologized that I didn’t have time to put vegetables in, only cheese, bugged him about whether he had enough warm clothes, fussed about the long day ahead (he has classes, and then work), asked about books and notebooks. He fell right into step: bleary-eyed fatigue, too tired to be excited right now, looking forward to classes but perhaps not to the 14-hour day ahead, not exactly thinking about the fact that today is the first day of the rest of his life. But at one point I put my hands on each side of his dear face and looked into it, and saw little Ben swimming up out of the years of his life, saw the open hope in the way his eyebrows turn up in the middle, in the way his face is relaxing and opening like a window…

I am so proud to be his wife. I am so proud he is my husband.

here’s that poem I told you about.

I haven’t written a poem in a while. This is a first draft, so I invite your comments.

***

Sex is a glass of water
the first glass of water set out in the morning for me to drink
in the thirsty morning and I'm woken up late and rushing past
and the glass drips
and halfway out the door I have time for only one gulp
and Holy God
it is the best water ever
but it is not enough

Arriving home
late
the glass is still there
warmed by the room
dusted and staled
I might drink it down
dust and all    faintly metallic

or I might let it sit    and evaporate
and I evaporate a little too
shrinking under my skin like a raisin
because somehow
it's hard to drink a glass of water
when you finally have time to drink it

One of those Sundays…mm, mm, mm.

Sunday was one of those days. It was one of those Sundays.

Let me start a little further back: when my wedding was approaching, people were really excited about my wedding night. I mean REALLY EXCITED. Almost as excited as me. They’d get all flushed and dewy-eyed talking about our first time. Which was also my first time. Intercourse, anyway. I was one of those “technical virgins” you’ve heard about. Roaming through this wilderness.

These were often the same people who, after I got married, would regularly interrogate me about the frequency and quality of our intimacies. Don’t get me wrong, I’m always up for a good sex talk, especially if it involves dispelling the INFURIATING misconception that after marriage sex suddenly dries up, or, like for instance, that married people don’t have oral sex (WOO girrrl), or that sex between married people is some kind of sterile, floaty affair (whoops, I used the word “affair”), involving a lot of gazing and interlaced fingers. Face-holding. Eye contact. And, of course, beds. And babies, too. As if sex outside of marriage is somehow less procreative.

So, back to Sunday. Well, almost…back to a few weeks and months past, as Ben’s been putting together his portfolio and his application, as we’ve been missing each other by millimeters, feeling each other’s breath on the back of each other’s necks as we pass, prickling with frustration, as he’s wanted me most at the crack of dawn (when I want nothing of the kind), and I want him most when I’m walking out the door to go to work. There’s a point when sex happens like breathing–and almost as often–and there’s a point when it still happens, but it involves a little more work and preparation…you have to prepare to not be prepared. Make space to unexpectedly be swept away. Tomorrow I’ll post a poem I wrote about this feeling. It’s not a feeling of a lack of desire, but a lack of space for it, a lack of time. Of stolen hours, some stillborn minutes.

So, Sunday. Can you tell what I’m getting at yet? We’ve been married for three years now, and people often ask me what it’s like, air their worries about the idea of being with one person for a lifetime. I suspect that they’re curious about our sex life, I think, because there are a lot of people who don’t spend a year and a half in a relationship (the length of time Ben and I were together before we were married), without having intercourse. They may or may not be the majority, but it’s at least perceived that way. I’m not bragging or touting some kind of victory here, I’m just making an observation.

I was tempted to characterize Sunday as the return to some kind of honeymoon mentality, but there it is again: a singleist way of looking at sex, that the only exciting sex life is the sex life closest to the fire of singlehood. What really happened? We spent time together. We rested in stillness for a while. We gave ourselves the space to catch each other by surprise. We did the work of loving each other, and the play happened on its own…which is its own kind of work. But the best kind.

hush

I’ve been trying to work-at-home this afternoon, had a group today and just trying to finish up my day, having a hard time, just wanting to do stuff by myself. Paint my nails, go get coffee. I even feel like grocery shopping, if you can believe it. My husband is gone for the weekend and there was a time that it would just kill me. There was a time that it would also just kill me to imagine a time that it wouldn’t kill me wo spend a weekend without him. I had to get married to be comfortable alone.

I slept in this morning trying to shake a migraine, and the pills I take for them make me all sleepy, so by the time I rolled out of bed I was all late. And B came waltzing into the room with a plate of eggs and some coffee, and I gulped and slurped, and I took a R_grace-is-late-shower (wash/condition hair, wash face, wash pits, that’s it), and was about to run out the door, and poor Ben is standing in the middle of the dining room saying, “Wait…” and he engulfs me in the slowest, softest, sweetest, mmmmm… I’m so fucking LATE.. and he says, “WAIT!” And I’m like, “I CAN’t…” and then I remember, he’s flying out this afternoon, he’s going to his cousin’s wedding, he’s gone all weekend. Oh MAN. Of all mornings to sleep in. And he cooked me BREffast and all. My baby. He’s probably flying into Charlotte right about now.

I left my wedding ring in Minnesota.

Both of them, actually. My aunt called me on the road to tell me. This was the conversation:

“Missing anything, Rachel?:
“No, what do you mean?…Did I leave something at your apartment?”
“LOOK AT YOUR LEFT HAND!”
“My left hand, what are you ta–Aw, crap.”

I take off my diamond when I got to bed, but I always leave the band on all the time. It was late, my aunt was chatting with me, I must’ve just stripped off all the jewelry without thinking. My ring finger has a smooth little ring-shaped indendation, complete with tan line. I can feel it, like a little riverbed.

I wrote this shortly after we were married

The Cost

It’s so easy now.
Like a baby:
whenever he’s out of my sightlines
I imagine him gone

or going. I conjure a hospital
bed, I conjure years, smells and wasting,
long sickness, his life clinging
and letting go,

drunk drivers, battalions
of drunk drivers,
his body tumbling like a dummy
at sickening angles
on the freeway shoulder
where his car had broken down,

or crushed against the overpass
like a sandwich in foil,
or burned
down to the crowns on his teeth
and the pins in his knee.

Some stray bullet.
Some old story, his face pasted.
Some scrap of video.

From the window where I sit,
I roll my already grieving body
through the sweetness
drunk on the almost-certainty
that I will see him soon.
I will probably see him soon.

I see myself getting up from the couch
on repeat,
rewound and replayed,
picking up the various calls:
“Mrs. Javellana?…
It’s about your husband.”