And so it happened

They started while I was driving home from work.  Triggered by nothing more than a pleasant memory, a sweet gesture that was well in the past.  The first few tears were slow, fat drops making rivulets down my cheeks.  Soon there were more memories, and with them came more tears. 

The time when I had the flu and he got up extra early on a Saturday morning to go to the shops.  He came back with brioche, something he had to visit several different shops to find.  While I continued to sleep, he put together a breakfast that he knew I would love.  I awoke to him leaning over me, asking how I felt and offering me French toast and coffee.

The solitary tears came faster as I reminded myself not to speed past the speed camera on the way home.  More thoughts came, unbidden.  The first time we kissed, sitting by that tiny waterfall after our picnic.  There were sobs now, and my shoulders shook with them as I pulled into the driveway.

I cried for an hour that night, and even my usual tactic of counteracting each pleasant memory with a painful one didn't help.  This was the breakdown I had been expecting since we made the decision to separate more than three weeks ago.  Despite how composed and functional I had been since then....despite the relief I felt, I know I was not exempt from this.

Unlike my tears over the past three years, these were not of desperation or of frustration at not being able to save something that was slipping from my grasp.  No, these tears were merely a release.  A mourning of what was and what should have been.  Of what we had, even though it was never quite what either of us wanted.  These were tears that tried to make sense of how he could be so wonderful to me at times, but still steadfastly not be in love with me.  They were of sadness, of an acknowledgment of loss.

So I cried as much as I needed to.  And I knew that this would not be the last time, that I would need to do this over and over until the pain had subsided, the loss had been mourned and the wounds had healed.

I cried, I missed him, and I cried some more.

Loop

Source

There are days when I am a cassette player.  When I was a kid we had a really old one, a bit of a fossil really.  It would get stuck and the tape would skip back and forth.  The same line would be sung again and again, like an obsession.

It often starts with a memory.  Me, picking a fight over something silly or asking him not to do something that he wanted to do.  At times he would be so stoic that his lack of reaction would cause me to continue to argue my case, well beyond what was necessary.  And he would continue to withdraw, fuelling my irritation further.

Other times it would be a revision of what happened in that first eighteen months.  The vaginismus that I started self-treating eight months into our marriage (but what if I had started earlier?).  The six to eight months of treatment that saw me cured (but why didn't I do it faster?).  The multitude of other excuses he produced for why he couldn't love me (my annoying mannerisms, my lack of 'self-awareness', my failure to clean the kitchen adequately for godssakes).

On the good days, the rational part of my brain wins.  The one that knows that the fights I picked were minor, usually justified and fairly on par with those in other people's marriages.  That I (mostly) reacted in a healthy way to the situation at hand. 

Miss Rational knows that dealing with a sexual dysfunction is easier imagined in hindsight than done.  There is the shame, the crippling feeling of inadequacy, the hope that one day it will all just work, somehow.  And all of that comes after the realisation that something is actually, seriously wrong. That this is not normal.  If a woman gets past all that and draws together the courage to seek treatment, there are the medical professionals, many of them who know very little about the condition much less how to diagnose it.

But there are also bad days.  The times when my mind is sucked into the vortex of regret, self-doubt and endless questioning.

 Those bad days, when rationality takes a back seat,  are the ones where for the entire day, one or two thoughts run in a loop in the cassette player of my mind.

If I had fixed this earlier....if I was what he wanted in every other way, he would have loved me.