nobody held a ceremony
Before anything else, her.Because what follows will sound like a manassembling a defence,and there is no defence. There is only what happened. She cooked like I was somebody's king.She was loyal in a way I have not met since.She laughed at the stupid things I saidand could make me useless with laughing.No one has loved me the way that woman loved me.Put that at the top of the pageand do not let me take it down. There was a thing our life did not have.The reasons were hers and they were not her faultand they are not mine to set down here.Understand only that it was never refusal.Nobody in that house was withholding anything. So we found the other doors, and there were many.Hands. The long kiss at the door.Her head on my chest with the whole weight of it,which I loved and still love,being the warmer body, the one that gives the heat.Her legs wound into mine in the dark.For a long season I believed that was enough.For a long season it was. Then I began to notice what I had become.Provider first. Then driver. Then fixer.Then the one who called about the insurance.Then confidant. Then something like a therapist,which no man should be to the woman he lies beside.Then, near the end, something close to a roommate. Somewhere in that list the boyfriend was retired.Nobody held a ceremony.There was no last day, no notice given.He simply stopped appearing on the schedule. I have a big body. Long arms. Long hands.It is a good body for holding a personand it was not being asked for anything else. A man can go a long wayconvincing himself he is above the wanting,that love is the high thing and the body only a guest.Then some ordinary afternoona stranger passes close to him in a doorwayand his whole skin reports for duty,and he learns that he has been lying,and that he has been lying for years,and that the one he lied to hardestwas the one doing the lying. And I said nothing. That is the part I own.Not the leaving. The years standing in front of the leaving.When I was hurt I smiled and negotiated it away.When I was angry I went quietand let the silence do the punishing for me.I have never once said early, plainly, to a woman's face,this is what I need and I am not receiving it.I could not say it to her.I am not certain I could say it now. And she was carrying weather of her own,older than me and heavier than mine.When the dark came for her I learned its timetable.When she went under, I went under.By the last year I could not tellwhich of us a feeling had started in.A man cannot pull anyone out of a roomhe has already moved into. So I ended it, and I ended it badly.Some months apart, I said. We will revisit it.Both of us knowing, or at least me knowing,that revisit was a soft word wearing a coat. She called. We talked. We cried down the telephone.She asked to see me and I said I was not ready.I was never going to be ready.I let her hold that door open a whole seasonbecause I did not have the courageto close it while she was watching. Then she closed it herself.She did the honest thing I could not do,and she did it alone. Some nights I put it back on the scale.The bad months. The tempers. The yearI could not separate my sadness from hers.And against all of that, the meals, the loyalty,the laughing, the hand that always found mine,a woman who loved me completelyand asked for nothing except that I stay. Could I have lived there? Everything but the one thing?I have run it many times.It comes out differently depending on the night. Here is what I have, and it is not much.I was loved better than I have been loved sinceby a woman I could not tell the truth to.I called my silence kindness for yearsand then I called my leaving kindness too,and only one of those can be true. She might know which.I have no way to ask. — tachi
next in the long tellings it is me again 