Deep

She's gone.  She's gone.  Oh, Lord, she's really gone!  Why would it take four years and a lot of miserable and wonderful life in between for me to finally realize this in my gut?  Every day, I think about the times I wanted to leave and the times I actually left.  She showed distrust when I felt I had proven to be the only person she could trust.  I was young and full of fire and ideals and inexperience.

"I have a question for you," she began.  "Are you doing drugs?  You are acting very strangely."

I flipped out.  I had tried repeatedly to reveal to her the anguish the second-shift proofreading job was causing me.  Her laboratory job was bringing in the biggest paycheck and she was stuck on second-shift.  I wanted desperately to break into publishing, marketing, advertising - anything that would put my new English degree to work.  But she banished me to dreary evenings under fluorescent lighting where I pored over phone book business listings, looking for misspellings of "Avenue" and bad zip codes.

And she insisted on us spending damn near every weekend with her fucked up family.  The same people who enabled her pedophile father to molest her.  The same mother and grandmother who repeatedly told her to just "get over it."  So we would sit there weekend after weekend in that dank, mildew-fragranced house.  The television flickered geriatric sitcoms and melodramas and I'd pretend to fall asleep.  Anything to escape that madness.

So basically, I had been sleeping my life away.  During the week I would get home from work by midnight, finally wind down and fall asleep by two or three in the morning, wake up by eleven or noon, and start over again. I just wanted to have a few waking, sane moments.

But she refused to consider a change.  For whatever reason, she did not trust me to work a different shift than she was.  She did not trust that we could have a fulfilling life by spending weekends alone in our new home.  So yes, the question about drugs hit me hard.

I left that night.  She quickly became a heaving, hyperventilating, tear-soaked mass in the upstairs hallway, but I left anyway.  Who, at eighteen, had been surprised to hear the story of her abuse shortly after our first intimate moment?  Who had supported her through crying fits and listened to the horrible details and helped her to find therapy?  And who had shown supreme indignation toward her remaining family members who treated her as if she were a criminal for issuing the mildest protest at the childhood she had suffered?

I should have stayed.  I should have been stronger, but at twenty-three I was not.  I found myself to be a good listener, a great sympathizer, until I found myself the target of the anger she should have aimed at her family - especially him.

I felt terrible about leaving.  I stayed with my mother for a while, absolutely shattered.  I spoke with my wife briefly, and she wanted us to just move on as if nothing had happened. She did not see any of this as her problem.  I couldn't do it.

The better part of a summer passed, and eventually I rented an economy apartment, had a lawyer draw up divorce papers, and even found a rebound relationship.  I needed someone to accept me for me, not as a sounding board for deep emotional problems or as a heavy bag for displaced anger.  It was a bad idea.  I found solace for a while in the other woman, but eventually heard the words, "You know I'm just going to leave you someday."  Love and contentment seemed moving targets.

Eventually, it ended, and I received a phone call from my wife not long after.  She asked me to come back and pick up some of my belongings. While I was there, something happened, and we reconnected.  She seemed broken, and I was definitely bent.  Neither of us had any direction, but we found each other again, and decided to make things work, and they did for eleven years.

I still hate that I left her, but now I understand that somehow it made us both a little stronger.  Do you know what I hate even more?  It's been four years, and I've never broken down into the same pile of desperation she became that night I left.  Not even once, save for a drunken outburst or two.  The shrapnel is buried deep, and I don’t have the strength to cut down to the bone.