work in progress - Stones

And so it is the silence. That how it seems at this hour. The silence. The cool breeze coming through the window. The standing lamp shedding its small arc of light, the passing cars in the streets outside. A person hollers,someone else answers. The night moves on in its own, nocturnal arc.

If I knew why my wife treated me the way she did throughout our marriage I would understand a lot of things: why we cause and suffer pain, why people do what they do, why some die who shouldn't and others don't who, perhaps, should. I would understand so many mysteries that life presents us every day. But her behavior towards me was as much a mystery as anything else was to me and how I lost the soul of my being was just one more added body to the carnage that was our marriage.

When she told me she was leaving, that she had accepted an overseas job and that she and the kids would be leaving in 6 months I had nothing to say. What could I say? Nothing, really, that hadn't already been said. We had discussed this possibility in the abstract way we had with conversation - nothing directly approached, everything termed under possibilities, nothing concrete or stated. There was the possibility of this or that with this or that and what did I think. I remember saying I would not quit what I was doing. Silence ensued as if that silence would will one of us to continue but, as with so many other conversations, neither of us took up the thread. Threads always seemed so impossible for us to take up. Our floors were littered with these neglected threads.

But losing her was not the hard part. In fact it was a relief. The weight of her disapproval had become so heavy for me that I didn't want to do anything around the house. It seemed so much to me that I could do nothing right, say nothing right and do nothing to correct either what I did or what I said. I fell into a slough of inactive, apathetic depression. I stole quiet moments for myself where I could revel in doing absolutely nothing and yet, at the same time, I would be consumed by the guilt of such inactivity. To act, to do something, anything required such effort and the effort almost never received a reward - in fact it often received the opposite - a blistering comment questioning why I had done what I had done. No, her going was such a relief. I felt freed.

Where I suffered was the kids. Having been their caretaker for as long as they had been alive, for the entire length of my fatherhood up until then, it seemed impossible that I would be separated from them, that I would no longer have the daily contact that I considered so vital to my being. I couldn't consider this and so, in truly cowardly fashion, I didn't - pushing all thoughts of this eventuality as far from my mind as I possibly could until the day when their absence hit me like an avalanche of rocks and I was buried in my own stupidity and pain.

This is a work of fiction copyrighted by author May 4, 2008