Decisions

Sometimes I felt like calling you and convincing you to come and run away with me somewhere in the west where it’s warm and we can bare our skin. I didn’t though, I thought about it and reached for the phone and I admit, I didn’t. I didn’t see you and you didn’t hear from me and in the end it was two years gone without contact until a chance meeting with reminiscing and gone again. And her there and here I am dwelling alone at night by the TV fire and cup of tea, the stars hidden behind clouds while a tribal rhythm beats in her belly miles away. I can’t stand to think of her anymore, there’s a scar there where I kept at it and every time I flinch when I sneak a moment to myself and think of her. It’s been fifteen years now and I never did make a call to her or do anything about it really. I really didn’t. As time filled the gape between us it became harder to reconnect and the things that we had in common got dusty and forgotten about. It would seem foolish to ever bring up some of those little relics in conversation, she wouldn’t remember and I would move on embarrassed. It would falter and the silence would be uncomfortable and she would shift in her chair with a little breath while I’m frantically still on the other end. Or maybe she doesn’t do that anymore, how would I know. As I said, it never happened so I was spared this humiliation. She might feel guilty, she never gave herself an inch when it came to matters like this but still I wouldn’t ring to reassure that really it was me all the time.

I do love my wife and she loves me, a devotion that I can barely understand and feel blindly guilty about and the silence at night. I didn’t notice it in the initial moon landing phase when the two of us were floating about the bedroom and eventually coming back panting to earth tired and delighted, I noticed it one night when we were together on our same standard double bed. The night was so warm I was laying back and thinking of sand dunes and scarves and dark eyes and it felt to roar across the desert all night and find a wilted little sandflower in the morning was all, but there again the same silence. My ignorant grunts were impolite to her and made her close up shut tight while I laboured away dripping and insecure. Afterwards when tenderness was everything that was needed I foolishly whispered it into her hair that it’s ok to make some noise if you’d like sometimes, thinking the empty rooms down the hall wouldn’t mind. She pawed off the warm covers and turned to me tensed by the implication. She has no claws though, she only looks at me and sort of slumps back after her soft attack. While I had visions or memories of nights with rushing sound like the feeling of a building falling down this wasn’t it. She could see it wasn’t her. She cried a good distance off and I felt badly like dying with shame there alone on the bed, the light was still on in the bathroom and the pillow was slightly damp. It was the first time I had made her cry and she didn’t let me forget it for three sunny days passed inside, ghosting around each other and trying to keep onside, smiling at any chance.

She didn’t forget after three days at all. She had noted it quietly it and would keep score religiously until she had finally decided finally to love this man. Then she would throw out the weighted pros and cons and scores kept long in the memory, throw out the unnecessary past and sign herself up. At that time she wasn’t solid on him, he wasn’t committed to it like she was. She wasn’t as sure as she used to be that this wasn’t what drew her in, this feeling of loving more than being loved. For two weeks afterwards she was raw with the memory of him above her and not a word between them, locked silence. It would take another four years and her thirtieth year to pass before she made up mind her finally and decisively.