Twenty-Eight Years To Sunrise
"Would you come with me? You have a good eye for this stuff."
The measuring of rooms to dream up layouts, an imagining of furniture and new spaces to inhabit. The signing of a lease. This, after an impossible summer of secrets, tears, and pain.
You may have noticed a slowing down of my publishing schedule these last couple of months, perhaps a darker tone in both words and images. Those were hints. Unintended, but hints nonetheless.
Cynthia moved out of our house yesterday. Our 28 years together (closer to 29) have now ended. The news fell on August 3rd, but I already knew. Weeks and weeks—months, really—of sensing a kind of wrongness pervading our days. Another silhouette moving in. Behaviours, micro gestures and habits transformed, just enough. You don't spend decades with someone without developing some instinct. But you hope you're wrong and you look away, talk to yourself, convince your heart and mind that it's paranoia, or a phase, just the ebbs and flows of sharing a life together.
Until time transforms from a river into a tidal wave.
I'm sure it won't always be easy but we're alright, actually. Not angry at each other despite what transpired, despite the complete shock to everyone, including our kids who never saw anything coming. Figuring it out. There's much to figure out—it all happened incredibly fast. Bullet speed, one revelation after another, the ground shifting and the depths below me dropping and dropping and dropping until this. Nothing. Like Alice, tumbling, her world suddenly unrecognizable. Curiouser and curiouser.
I've been numb, generally, a void wall towering over most mornings of most days. But sadness swells at sudden and unpredictable moments, triggered by even the smallest of memories. There's no logic and no structure behind any of it. It's a healthy release, I'm aware of that, but distance will surely help. This well of tears will dry up, eventually, as new routines and rhythms graft their steady backbeats onto undiscovered songs. New hopes will displace old dreams. A dismantling towards reconstruction. I can already see faint signs appearing at times, like signals from afar.
I don't regret a single second, and neither does she. Our life, both captured and hidden, remains; it always will. The pain will fade but who we were? That's etched in stone forever.
We're a family, all five of us, and we'll always be a family—little else matters in the end.
Very little else.
Sunrise.
