thick
The air is thick with something less palpable than tension, something…softer. A cocktail of uncertainty, residual guilt, and an almost adolescent optimism.
Two days ago, I drove away from my wife and my children, convinced that it was the best of all possible decisions. My wife pulled a strong expression over her pained grimace, determined to withstand the crushing blow of my choice to leave. Through a blur of tears, the six of us packed what few things I called my own, toted them to my car, and then we hugged and cried some more.
The event carried an unfortunate sense of finality. My life will include my children—my gregarious 11-year-old, poised for student council and all manner of scholastic enterprise; my 10-year-old artist/athlete with thoughts of life as a chemist; my 8-year-old beauty queen who positively beams when she’s dancing; and my 6-year-old tomboy who, at one point, demanded we call her a boy. This intention, though, must strike them as disingenuous. “Why leave if you say you want us in your life?” they’ve asked. “Because that’s the honest choice,” I told them. It’s an impotent answer.
My life will include the woman whom, for the past seven years, I’ve called “Wife$#148;; but in what capacity I’m nervously unsure. Ours was an intense love, an intense relationship, and for most of our marriage “forever” didn’t feel long enough. Something in me changed, though, and had I been honest with both of us earlier, some of the pain would have been obviated. I turned my emotional change into ways in which she failed me. I eventually became comfortable lying to her, wearing the tattered justification that it was the less hurtful of my options.
So, I sit, unwashed, no home, a couple of bucks in my pocket, and all my shit packed into the back of my car. Don’t pity me—I made the choice, and on that I am fixed; but I can’t shake the weight of having caused so much pain even if I did so, ultimately, with the best of intentions.
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