by Kim Dinan
It was another thing I resented him for: overapologizing.
“You’re not sorry,” I snarled. “You’re just saying that to shut me up. You’re taking the easy way out.”
Over the past few months I’d thrown that accusation at him dozens of times as I lashed out in my unhappiness. Here we go again, I thought, and I readied myself for another fight.
Brian put his hands up to his head. He looked as though he wanted to disappear. He took a deep breath. When I was upset it elevated to crying and screaming. When Brian was upset he grew quieter and calmer, his anger simmering into a vicious boil.
“I can’t do this anymore,” he said calmly.
“What?”
“I can’t. I can’t do it anymore. I’m tired of having the same argument over and over again, Kim. We had these problems in Portland. We had them in Ecuador, in Peru, in every goddamned country we’ve been in. We can’t get away from them. Nothing ever changes. I’m miserable. You’re miserable.” He took a deep breath and raised his head to meet my eye. “You make impossible demands on me without acknowledging how far I’ve come. I’ve done everything you’ve asked me to do. I quit my job and left my entire life behind to come traveling with you. I’m not perfect, but I’m improving. I’m trying Kim. I’ve tried so damn hard.”
The anger drained from my chest as I stared hard at him. What he said was true. He had tried hard. Upon my request back in Portland, Brian had begun to see a therapist to address some of the issues that had kept him so inaccessible. For a while we’d done better. And yet, he wasn’t the only one in our relationship that needed guidance. I was no perfect partner. But I was too stubborn to admit it, and Brian, for whatever reason, did not mention it either. His indifference hurt me.
Whatever progress we’d made back in Portland had been erased on the road. Adjusting to the tilt-a-whirl reality of constant togetherness had caused us to retreat into the confines of our own heads again. Brian once again enveloped himself in silence, and I felt lonelier than I had ever been.
“I love you, Kim, but I’m not sure I can be the person you want me to be. I’m not sure anyone can be the person you want me to be.”
Brian gestured to a park across the street sprinkled with wrought iron benches and began walking toward one. The muscles in the back of his neck tensed as he walked. I loved his neck, his back, his shoulders. Was I about to lose him? A sudden rush of affection flooded me as it always did when I thought about life without him.
Crumpling onto the park bench, I folded my knees up to my chest. The evening had turned dark, but I slid the sunglasses over my eyes, hopeful that they’d hide my tears.
“Kim, I’ve done everything you’ve asked of me. I’ve opened up to you and supported you through this gigantic change in our lives that you initiated. When you’ve asked for alone time I’ve given it to you, and I’ve tried to take control by starting conversations and asking directions and buying bus tickets and booking rooms in hostels for us. I gave Veronica the yellow envelope money because you didn’t want to. Do you know how uncomfortable that made me? It’s not easy for me, but I do those things because I know it’s important to you that I do them. And yet at the same time you can’t give me the one thing I ask for. You won’t even try. Do you know how it feels to me, how much it hurts, that you won’t even cave to my one request? Trust me, I know it’s hard because it’s hard for me too. But you make me feel like the smallest person on the planet when you ignore the one thing I ask you to work on.”
He was right. Throughout the ups and downs of the past few months he’d had only one request, and I hadn’t even attempted to meet it. Brian communicated physically, with hugs and kisses and snuggling and sex. Even back home, he’d only ever asked that I give of myself in the same way. He wanted me to kiss him in the kitchen and snuggle with him on the couch, to reach for his hand sometimes when we walked down the street. But I hadn’t even tried. And since we’d left home I’d grown even colder, shrugging off his advances. I sat on my high horse issuing demands while building a fence around my vulnerability.
There was a reason, but it wasn’t one that I could tell Brian because I could barely admit it to myself. I was not sure that I wanted to be married anymore. And in some warped corner of my mind I’d convinced myself that if I gave Brian what he needed without first being certain that I’d stay in the relationship that I would be leading him on. How could I make him happy and then leave? I told myself that if I kept him miserable, my departure—if it came—would be met with some relief. I didn’t want to admit it to myself or to him, but that’s what I had been doing the entire trip.
The harder he tried to love me, the more terrified I felt. He was in a situation that he could not win. Yet I still pushed him to give more, to communicate better, to be sweeter or more romantic, to take charge or back off in various and unpredictable circumstances that I decided on a whim. And all the while I knew that he could have morphed into anything, into anyone. He could have met every single one of my demands, and it still would not have been enough. I had convinced him that he was lacking because I’d been too selfish and too terrified to admit that, in fact, it was me who was not whole. That was the crux of this whole damn thing. I was not whole. And I did not know if I could become a whole person while sharing my life with Brian.
Yet the yellow envelope had shown me that, though giving could be uncomfortable, it came with its own rewards. If I could learn to be vulnerable to strangers for the sake of Michele and Glenn’s gift couldn’t I also give of myself to my husband in the same way? Couldn’t I at least try? Didn’t he deserve it more than anyone else?
That evening I’d emailed Wendy and explained what had happened in the park. She’d responded in five short sentences:
Everything changed for me when I realized that the only person I could control was myself. I can’t control what people do, only how I respond to what people do. You have the same choice. What would happen if, the next time Brian asked for love, you gave it to him?
Her words set off a panic inside of me. What would happen if I allowed myself to love Brian the way he deserved to be loved? It was too scary to think about. I charged on, ignoring Wendy’s advice.
• • •
The quaint villages of the German countryside sped by as our train raced down the line. Decorated trees held vigil in the town squares and clock towers glowed in festive white lights. “It looks just like you’d imagine in fairy tales,” I told my sister over the phone the evening before when I called home on Christmas Eve. “It’s a storybook.” Christmas in Germany, with the candles burning in the medieval windows and the holiday wreaths gracing the doors, was Hollywood perfect, and I seemed to be hollow by contrast. The emptiness inside of me had spread like spilled oil, leaving a stain of darkness in its wake.
My attention wandered back toward the window, and I thought of my family across the ocean in Ohio. They were probably gathered in the living room of my parent’s house playing board games as a football game blared on the TV. I could almost smell the spread of food on the kitchen table and see my sisters sitting cross-legged on the carpet, plates of appetizers stacked in their laps. I imagined the presents wrapped under the Christmas tree. Back in Peru, Brian and I had mailed home Christmas gifts of alpaca blankets and handwoven hats, and I wondered if they’d opened the packages yet. More than anything I just wanted to be home.
When I stole a glimpse at Brian, he appeared to be deep in thought, his head cocked toward the speeding landscape outside. I knew he missed home as much as I did, yet instead of sharing our sorrow, we’d wrapped ourselves in our individual sadness.
But we’d planned a Skype call with Brian’s family from the airport. The thought of the phone call lifted me, and I knew how much Brian looked forward to it. We needed to cast our nets toward home, to catch the familiar and drag it to these distant shores to buoy us for awhile. We needed a reprieve from our sinking.
Three nights back, on our last night in South America, we’d been perched like caged birds on opposite sides of the bed in a sad little standoff. But unlike most nights, that night we hadn’t argued. What we’d come to was closer to resignation.
Our arguments, at least, were born of emotion: of hurt, of love, of desperation. But that night we’d waved the white flag of surrender, too exhausted and injured to continue the war. I’d finally told Brian the truth: I didn’t know if I wanted to be married anymore. He hadn’t even seemed surprised. Instead, I’d recognized a look of relief in his eyes. We’d agreed: There were too many knots in our marriage to untangle. The mess felt simply too big.
Later, as Brian lay breathing the ragged rhythm of the unconscious, I’d slipped out of bed and in the darkness fumbled for my shoes. As I unplugged my laptop and tucked it under my arm, Brian had not stirred. When I closed the door softly behind me, it clicked into place, and the tiny sound was magnified by the utter silence of my surroundings.
On the rooftop patio of our rental apartment I found a weak but steady Wi-Fi signal and sat down at a forgotten rusted table. The clock on my laptop read twenty minutes past two in the morning. Around me the air hung sticky but cool, and above me the black Argentinian sky was pricked with a map of stars. A full yellow moon hung low in the sky. The landscape held a heightened sense of beauty in the way things do during times of raw heartache. The pulse of the earth felt magnified. And I felt both electrifyingly alive and unable to bear the pain of my aliveness.
My eyes burned from crying. I squeezed them shut against the glow of my laptop and counted time zones in my head. It was 2:30 a.m. but only 9:30 p.m. in Portland. I pictured Brian and myself in a rewound home video running backward up the continent toward home and slipping in reverse through our old front door. Portland existed five hours in the past, where we had not yet said the words we said or made the decisions or cried the tears.
As I pulled up my email I scrunched my eyes closed again. Wendy should be home. “Please be there, please be there, please be there,” I whispered into the night. I typed You there? into the subject line. In the body of the email I wrote: Can’t sleep and really need to talk. I hit send. I could hardly breathe.
Four years earlier I’d met Wendy at work. She called me one day and introduced herself, her words clacking through the phone at double speed. Then she appeared at my desk, a slim, beautiful girl about my age with a face full of freckles and brown hair that hung down her back. She stuck out her hand, and when I extended mine she pumped it with gusto. “Hi, I’m Wendy. Nice place you’ve got down here next to the copy machine,” she said with a grin. She stuck her head into my cube and saw the shoes tucked beneath my desk. “Are you a runner?” Right away I could tell she was a force of nature. She possessed the sort of intensity that normally caused my introverted soul to turn and run. But we hit it off, bonded by a shared love of running and a mutual disdain for the thumping bureaucracy of government work.
In the years since we met we’d run thousands of miles together, hashing through the details of our lives. She helped me talk through my discontentment long before I’d found the courage to admit my life needed changing. And then, when I saw what had to be done, she cheered me along as Brian and I went about the slow and emotional task of disassembling our lives.
She was the only one who knew I felt that maybe, because Brian and I had come together at such a young age, that I had missed out on something. Not the wild years of dating and promiscuous sex, but something deeper and simpler: an opportunity to become myself.
Wendy knew that I wasn’t sure if I’d chosen Brian or if I’d just gotten swept up in life with him. Did I even truly love him? How could I be sure if I had no control group with which to measure my feelings? I trusted Wendy to listen without judgment. She let me say things without being held to them, to try statements on for size. “I love him so much,” I’d say, just moments after questioning if, perhaps, I did not know what love was at all. She acted as my sounding board as I talked through my confusion in order to determine what felt false and what felt true.
Wendy possessed a kind of laser truthfulness that didn’t allow me to lie. She asked me direct questions I didn’t want to answer. She was tenacious. She wouldn’t let me hide from myself.
Standing, I pushed my chair back from the table and walked to the edge of the rooftop. Below me the streets were silent and vacant, the streetlamps illuminating nothing but the bugs that batted against them in the humid nighttime air.
Maybe this is what it feels like to be alone, I thought, and my throat squeezed with the uncomfortable truth of my desire. I’d lived thirty-one years without knowing what it was like to be alone. And now an essential part of me demanded the freedom and space to define myself.
I needed to find out what I would do if the slate of my life were wiped clean.
From across the rooftop I squinted at my computer. An email had arrived in my inbox.
I’m here. Isn’t it the middle of the night?
Quickly, I shut my email and pulled up a chat box and typed:
It’s almost 3 a.m.
Wendy wrote back:
What’s going on?
We had a talk. It might be over this time. We’re so exhausted. We’ve been dealing with this for months. I’m tired of going around in circles. We can’t come to any conclusions. I don’t feel happy. He doesn’t feel happy. At this point it just seems easier to walk away.
My fingers rested above the letters that would spell out the biggest thing of all.
I told him the truth. I told him I don’t know if I want to be married anymore. We’ve agreed to take some time apart.
My finger clicked the enter key, and the message flew across countries to Wendy. Three little dots scrolled across the chat box. Wendy was typing. They disappeared and then emerged again. I imagined her at home on her couch trying to come up with the right thing to say. Finally, words popped up on the screen.
Oh Kim, what a hard thing to come to. I’m so sorry. I know you’ve been struggling with this for a long time. It’s a hard decision to make.
My fingers sat numb on the keyboard and tears welled in my eyes again. Alone, I nodded into the empty night. The second rule of the yellow envelope popped into my head: Share your experiences. Finally, I’d done that, and now everything I’d ever known was crumbling around me. The pain felt physical, a living, breathing entity that had locked its arms around me, squeezing.
What do I do? I typed. I just want to come home. Wendy’s clarity was more critical to me than the oxygen circulating in my own blood.
There was a long pause as the circles danced across the screen.
I think the first thing I can tell you is that making the decision to separate is only the first step. Brian is your best friend. He’s someone you’ve had next to you for the last…how long?
10 years.
10 years. That’s a long time to have someone by your side. Ending your relationship carries the loss of the possibility of your future together, the pain of the past, and perhaps the fear of being alone.
But I wasn’t afraid of being alone. Was I? It was something I knew so little about that I didn’t have the experience to fear it.
My first advice is to take a minute and either with Brian or by yourself truly identify those reasons that you two are no longer made for each other. Identify tangible reasons you do not want to be with him. You will need those when you miss him. Then think about what, where, and who you want to be in the future. Make sure you know these things so that when you feel weak you can brace yourself with the hope of the future and the happiness that lies ahead. Going back to these things in breakups has always helped me. And as for what to do next, how do you feel? What seems right?
I typed, simply, Nothing seems right.
If you really want to come home because you want the strength of those that know you and can support you, then
that might be the best option. But maybe you need to just run free for a month. Catch your flight to India, take the rickshaw ride with those girls and see where it puts you. You can always come home at any point. The worst-case scenario if you stay is that you are a complete wreck and end up bailing half way through to come home. But the worst-case scenario if you come home is regretting leaving. Do you have more things to talk to Brian about? Is going home just an escape from the hard work that needs to happen? I think you should come home if you really want to, but I’m not sure that’s the right choice.
As I read her words slowly, I imagined her voice saying them to me. Deep down, going home felt like running away, avoiding the problem I had to continue to face. But the relief of it was hard to pass up. It’d be so easy to just step on a plane and lock myself in Wendy’s spare bedroom until I could face the light again.
Yeah. I just don’t know. It’s so hard to tell what I want. I’m just so tired. Everything feels so impossibly hopeless. I want so badly to be by myself, but at the same time I can’t imagine life without Brian.
What about just taking a few weeks away from each other to get some perspective? Try being alone. This rickshaw race seems like the perfect opportunity to have some time apart.
And then she typed the thing that nagged me deep down, the thing that I needed above all else but could not see a way to have without leaving my husband.
When was the last time you did anything on your own?
My brain flipped through the pages of my memory but I could not remember. I did not know if I’d ever done anything on my own. And how could I be a whole person, how could I be a wife, an adult, a full, actualized woman, if I had never done anything alone?
My fingers began typing, but then I erased it, I started again and then erased that too. The screen glowed at me expectantly, waiting for an answer. The whole world seemed to hold its breath.
I wrote: