Maybe she won't leave

I decide, if this is one of our last days together, one of the last opportunities to make memories before our divorce, I want them to be pleasant.

I suggest that we walk to Holy Cow, our local ice cream shop, to which Amber enthusiastically agrees. We walk, her hands holding my bicep, for part of the trip. It is an unseasonably warm day for early November, one of the few that has slipped by Nature. By the weekend, it is going to be in the fifties and only descending further from there.

She doesn't know that she is going to divorce me. She might not, but she might. Not today, but someday. She will get tired and frustrated with our relationship and will gather the energy to end things. It will be a chore. We have built so much together over these years. I might as well have it be loving until it reaches that terminal point. Not to convince her otherwise or win her back. What's done is done (or will have been done). It is so that she can hold onto these memories when it happens, remember that it was nice for a while, that I was a good companion on this leg of her journey, and she doesn't regret everything. She might resent me a little less, but it would be selfish to say I am doing it to be less horrible in retrospect. I want her to have a good day.

I've been having a fit of mental illness for the last few days. It is chemical, my body struggling with the lack of light and other company, though there have been a few relationship stressors. One is minor and one is not, but it is also not something we are going to resolve easily. It will work itself out, said Amber. It hasn't so far. I went into therapy for years with this as a catalyst and it didn't resolve itself.

I woke her this morning for our daily goodbyes. She has taken the week off from work. She did not get a vacation over the summer and decided that November was the time to take it. She had been sanding our bathroom, anticipating applying the cans of paint that have been sitting in our kitchen for a month. She likes her projects.

I woke her to say our goodbyes, but I didn't want to. I had woken before five and lain in bed thereafter, partly to confuse my fitness tracker into thinking I am better rested than I am and partly to trick myself into thinking the same. In that early hour, my brain plans--what I must write, what to do at work, and conversations I am having with puppet versions of people I know. It is a deadly time. I did not get any more sleep and conceded defeat twenty minute before my alarm was to buzz.

I woke her and I didn't want to because we had had a stress--hers and then I absorbed it. She seemed to shrug it off within a few minutes, but I have had to work on not doing exactly what I did.

I woke her and, within a few minutes, I was sobbing. I told her that I knew it was unfair and that this was not the time for the conversation. I told her that sadness filled me, amending it to depression. I didn't have the resilience that would otherwise have let me feel in control of this. She should not be the one to console me, but she tried. I hope that she thereafter got a little more sleep.

I emailed her from work, something light. When I am having these attacks, what I want to do is torture her with how hard of a time I am having. I know better than to make her do this emotional labor for me. She has her own life, her own sadness.

She responds as though she doesn't know I am in the persistent low hum of a crisis, possibly because she is unaware. I know now in a way I didn't years ago that my bouts of mental illness have little rooting in what is happening in the world. I am one of the worse people possible to talk about my depression while I am living through it.

I wrote to her our commonplace warmth--that I love her, that I look forward to seeing her soon--and she responded in kind. She was not putting on some facade because she was aware that I am fragile. My mental illness is certain that this is all an act, but I am more certain my mental illness is a lying asshole and not to be trusted.

I come home and do not tell my wife that I have spent the day caging this horrible creature in the prison of my ribs. I have such practice being human on the outside that I can almost forget that I am shriveled on the inside, something left in the sun too long. On the outside, I am functional, and that is what I want Amber to see. What a good, integrated husband she has for a little while longer.

Days ago, I hid in the bedroom while she was upstairs. I read a faintly grotesque book, but well-written in places, hoping that it would distract me. When Amber went downstairs to brush her teeth, I slipped back up to sit on my cushion in my nook. I wasn't avoiding her, but I also wasn't ready to sleep. I don't remember what set me off. I recall that I said that I resented that she treated me like a child who did chores for her. I'm not sure now what I meant by that. She sat on my legs, trying to cuddle with me on my cushion. I stared at the blinking lights of our wireless router, finding that I could not break my focus in the darkness. I told her how it bothered me that she mock-rolls her eyes when I say sincere, affectionate remarks. She said she doesn't like when I sexualize her. I assured her that most of my comment are not sexual, just appreciative. I kept adding "Or I could be mentally ill" into paragraphs where I choked out how I was feeling. I cried a little and made my way down to the bedroom, sleeping well.

The day after, we worked on her new patio set on the back porch, her on her homework, me on a story for my site. It was another warm day and it was good to remember this.

It was an easier issue, whatever I was on about. It was mental illness causing me to think things that I know are not true.

Not like acknowledging that Amber is going to leave me. Other people (one other person) left me in part because of this. That is sensible, my mental illness assures me, leaving you.

But I don't want the time until Amber does leave to be miserable for her. I don't want to put this on her. I want her to see me as close to my best as I can maintain. Again, not to convince her to stay with me, but because we deserve to have this memory when we walked to get ice cream on a November evening. One more for the pile, but it beats how the day could have gone.

A child on a bicycle races by, apologizing only after he has startled Amber into clinging to me, not slowing down.

"I thought it was an animal!" she says.

"Technically, children are animals."

We are halfway to Holy Cow when Amber makes a joke wondering if Holy Cow is even open. I laugh, but surreptitiously check my phone. It is not. Not because of the month--Holy Cow is open all year and does good business--nor COVID. Mondays are not a day they are open.

We are too far along to turn back. We continue on to check that the internet is correct. I offer her other, less satisfying ice cream options. She decides we are going to walk a little further to the grocery store, where I would buy us pints of ice cream and her Doritos as penance for having not checked in advance.

We pass a tractor tearing up a field. "There used to be a community garden there," Amber says, a touch mournfully. She worked hard on it, made it her project, before the landowner decided he was tired of having the field used and plowed it under.

"I met a beautiful woman there," I tell her.

"You knew me already."

"Yes," I say, "but I met you there often."

"People will think that you didn't know me before, the way you are saying that."

It is a good memory to have. We used to do things like this more often, when she was less busy, when there was not COVID. I cherish memories of us walking back from Holy Cow as I tried to keep my cone from melting all over my hand. We were younger then, I suppose, though I see us in this state of Eternal Now. Now, I have a wife. Now, for a little while longer, Amber wants to keep it that way.

My mental illness is a chatterbox and letting it use my mouth is rarely not a mistake. It is selfish to purge when it is only going to ruin the rest of the day. She could have this walk back from the grocery store, ice cream under her arms, Doritos in her hand, or she could have me forcing her to reiterate reassurances at me, making her miserable. How could I begin to choose the latter? It is my problem, not hers.

We make it home after dark, the sun setting so early this time of year. We have more than a month of the days getting shorter before a reprieve. I had made a crockpot meal, so dinner was waiting for us. I ate, concentrating on being in the moment, though she is looking at furniture on her phone as an anime she likes plays on the television.

Dinner ends. The show ends. She puts on Last Week Tonight. I wash the dishes. There is no need to slack on chores because one feels one's life might be collapsing and the woman one loves and have loved for the better part (the best part) of a decade will realize that one can't give her want she wants, what will fulfill her. I keep up the pretense because that is all she will know or remember. She is not a creature inclined to overanalyze and attempt to mind read until revolted that she cannot ever know another being fully. She is not, in short, me. I have learned to assume that she will talk to me about something if she needs to talk. Beneath moving through her nightly activities, she is not masking an ocean of fearful certainty of what must come.

We sit and eat some of our ice cream. Amber does not provide us bowls, only spoons. Hers is Cherry Garcia, at which she stabs. Mine is a light mint chip, which is soft. It is a nice memory, this night where we had this ice cream, me taking a few shallow stabs at hers, her turning her nose up at mine.

We shower and it is normal. I talk about work. We tell work stories while showering, something that doesn't make any specific sense but tends to be our habit. I finish before her, as I usually do, and leave her to shower while I type to relieve some of this pressure before bed. I am intent to keep this from her as long as possible. It is not her job to shoulder a burden that will seem insignificant tomorrow, more than likely, or will have receded to manageable levels until we hit another bump or my mental health dips below a threshold.

I manage to give her a good evening and enjoy most of it myself, despite not being an actual person but instead some moldy raisin inside my head, some failed organism wasting the time of the best person I have ever met, in a garden, in my bed, on our wedding day, in the backyard of a priestess at a peace drumming once.

I write this all out five feet from her while she watches videos on her phone, unaware how my heart is breaking to lose her, even though it hasn't lost her yet and might not.

last watched: Fruits Basket
reading: Geek Love