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When I was young I’d sworn I’d never marry. I’d understood, back then, that commitment was a trap that closed off otherwise accessible exit routes. Then I had therapy for ten years and learned that commitment was a gift, the ability to give your heart to another. To forsake all others.
Then, more than a decade into marriage, I had to relearn that it’s also the other thing, the trap. It’s both. I felt stupid, having to relearn something that, thirty years ago, I’d already known. Together, the two truths were heavier than they were separately. I held tight to them both.
You don’t think of a potential life outside your marriage unless you’ve already destroyed something essential about it. Once you can think like that, you’ve created the possibility that it could end. Close to the end, I’d begun to imagine that new life. I’d thought it would be like turning a page. But then John left, and I was in an unimagined time.
When he fucked me from behind, he’d always rested his elbows on my lower back, and every single time he did it, I told him that it hurt, and every single time, including that time, he put his elbows right back onto my back as soon as he got lost again in his private euphoria.
I hoped the child wouldn’t do that to his wife.
Then I wondered if John’s mother had ever had that thought.
I became a tugboat hauling around a mortifying barge of unwashed sadness. My son stood on deck, frightened and helpless. My breath reeked of the grave. I was inhuman, annihilated.
Early in our marriage, John had said we should make our life decisions mathematically, with numeric values assigned to each category. His art career and day job both got fives. Mine got threes because my career was more advanced than his and my day job didn’t pay as much as his. When I suggested that we make these decisions together, John didn’t say anything, and the conversation ended.
ack
I was still trying to explain to myself how I’d become this person, this discarded wife, when I’d never even wanted to be a wife in the first place.
I wrote in my notebook, Please let there be a lesson at the end of this.
A husband might be nothing but a bottomless pit of entitlement. You can throw all your love and energy and attention down into it, and the hole will never fill.
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I thought of us walking together, a little bent, bony, stepping carefully, in our very old age, our gnarled hands clasped. His eyes are still a shocking green. Our hair is white. We walk together like people who have had fifty years to learn each other’s gaits and to learn how to respond to each other’s slight teeterings on the pavement. That future was gone. The image of it scraped at me.
But I’d only ever pictured that image from the perspective of someone watching the old couple, even though in the image I am supposedly the wife.
So I wasn’t mourning an experience of being that wife; I was mourning a romantic image of her, walking with her beloved and adoring husband, who had never existed.
I started keeping a diary twenty-five years ago. It’s eight hundred thousand words long.
I didn’t want to lose anything. That was my main problem. I couldn’t face the end of a day without a record of everything that had ever happened.
I wrote about myself so I wouldn’t become paralyzed by rumination—so I could stop thinking about what had happened and be done with it.
More than that, I wrote so I could say I was truly paying attention. Experience in itself wasn’t enough. The diary was my defense against waking up at the end of my life and realizing I’d missed it.
Imagining life without the diary, even one week without it, spurred a panic that I might as well be dead. ♦
Living in a dream of the future is considered a character flaw. Living in the past, bathed in nostalgia, is also considered a character flaw. Living in the present moment is hailed as spiritually admirable, but truly ignoring the lessons of history or failing to plan for tomorrow are considered character flaws.
I still needed to record the present moment before I could enter the next one, but I wanted to know how to inhabit time in a way that wasn’t a character flaw.
Remember the lessons of the past. Imagine the possibilities of the future. And attend to the present, the only part of time that doesn’t require the use of memory. ♦