the habit of being

You’re reduced to dinner conversation these days, the sad soliloquies other men will put up with in order to make me feel closer to them. I talk about idealism, about “I was so young,” about intensity and fragility and obsession. I can’t look anyone in the face while I try to put into words how much I loved you, how much we hurt each other. I do not expect anyone to understand.

Every few weeks I’ll get to urge to contact you, thinking this time it’ll be different, this time we’ll be able to say something, this time it won’t matter that everything is already said and done, all those years packed up into bite-sized soundbytes I can use as excuses for my behavior now, recovery stories and confessions.

For a while I thought I might not ever be able to forgive you, but now it seems like you’re the only person I’ve ever been able to forgive, and at what price? For every tear stained sentence there were pages I could never bring myself to write. As hard as it’s all been, I feel like I’ve gotten off easy - losing you should’ve torn me up more than it did. Bimonthly yearnings to brag to you on my supposed happiness, my sanity, and my excessive lifestyle are nothing really. Wanting to know how you are isn’t much. Still, I can’t let go of this image of us, years from now, eating dessert together, protected enough to stand it, and then walking off again into our separate lives.

(For now, you’re going to hike the Appalachian Trail, you say. I’m going to go back to New York, I say. You say you’re doing yoga now. I tried to drag you to class for six months, and now you’re doing yoga. Good, I say. We exchange Buddhist book titles. I say, it’s been a year since we stopped traveling, which really means, it’s been a year since the abortion. You say, it really sounds like you’re getting things together. You say, I’m happy for you.)