Belated 8th Anniversary Post

Dear Jim,

Sometimes I like to pretend I made perfect sense before I married you (in all your complications, depth, and passion) and before we brought, in less than four years, three babies into the world.

I am (we are) in a pressure cooker to be sure, but I think it's important that I try to remember who and how I was (really was) before you...and between you and you. I am thinking back to our weekend in South Boston. It had been thirteen years since we'd touched and eleven since we'd looked upon one another's faces.

It's been more than eight years, now, since South Boston: long enough that the brightness and sharpness of those few days are gone. But when I try, really try, to remember the truth about them, I remember first and foremost how much I cried.

I remember how, without my asking, you said everything I wanted you to say. I remember how I couldn't handle it: how I left early, telling you I needed time to process it. I remember how I couldn't, didn't believe it.

But it was all true; wasn't it. I am not asking. You are still here.

For eight years, you have lived out what you said in South Boston; still, I do not always believe you love me. This is rarely your fault. We are so far in; still, I am terrified. Terror does not always look like one might expect. This is not a cheap, horror movie. This is our home, and these are our lives and the lives of our babies.

Somewhere in the middle of a bed in the middle of a log cabin in the middle of the woods, there is a woman crying. She is pinned against her sleeping husband by one of his Paul-Bunyan forearms, but it is not what (it is rarely what) one might think. He scratched her back with his chin before he fell asleep, and before that, they talked in the dark as though it were 1994. Or 2007.

I am that woman. Mostly, I am thinking I want to die your wife.

Brandee