Abiding

Notice him at work on the other side of the office in an unadorned cubicle.  Yours is cluttered with taped up Onion headlines & a lot of pictures of you with your giant dog.  There are many, many coffee ring stains overlapping across your desk like a Venn diagram. 

Notice he is friendly when he needs to speak with co-workers, but that he keeps to himself.  His walk is brisk and his hands are sunk deep into his pockets when he arrives and leaves work each day.  He eats alone, you are pretty sure.  You have a goofy little lunch group that laughs louder than the people at surrounding tables in the work cafeteria.  You and your friends take turns telling inappropriate jokes & sharing stories of the annoying habits of your cubicle neighbors & wondering aloud how much longer you can stand to work there.

Notice his desktop screensaver when you walk past his desk.  It is of a band you also like.  Become curious about some of his other tastes and interests, and casually wonder if you two might have a lot in common.  Decide to comment on the band screensaver the next time you walk past.  Do so in an overly enthusiastic manner & feel your cheeks grow hot.  Feel relieved when he responds in a gracious and friendly way, but remain embarrassed and leave his desk a bit too abruptly.

Have several exchanges of this nature.  Grow, not more relaxed, but more comfortable being ill-at-ease in his presence.  Begin to IM here and there, about music and the banality of your jobs. 

The IMs increase in length and frequency, expand in topic.  A rapport is established; a fondness is obvious.  Feel an unexpected sting in your guts when he makes mention of his wife.  He has a wife.

Begin to really look forward to these IMs.  Chomp at the bit to message him the second you get to your desk in the morning.  Exercise tremendous self-control by waiting ten whole minutes.  Vow to let him send the first message the following day.  Fail.  Make the same resolution every day for many, many days.  Succeed every so often. 

Begin to learn a lot about this boy.  Begin to share even more about yourself, compulsively.  Reveal every inch of yourself: your absurd humor, your chronic self-doubt, your spunk.  Trot out every fiber of your big, dumb heart.

Visit him at his desk one day.  When he looks up at you feel as though you have just stepped off a boat.  Something in that look unmoors you, makes you wobbly.  Your pulse bounces for close to an hour afterward.

Ask him if he wants to walk to the workplace café for some coffee.  Make jokes at an astounding rate of speed on the short walk.  Fail to let him chime in.  Fill small, natural gaps in conversation with breathless chatter.

One day, weeks or months into this thing, you receive a message that strikes terror and joy into your heart.  “I need to talk to you.  Can we chat on Facebook tonight?”  What could he need to say to you that he couldn’t say over work IM?  You had already covered your disdain for Catholicism, your outrage over the very existence of Republicans, & the song lyrics that moved you both greatly.    

Think to yourself that whatever he has to tell you must be BIG.  Set a time to cyber-rendezvous& promptly get a horrible stomach ache from nerves.  Speculate over possible harmless reasons a person might need to talk to a friend and co-worker.       

Force yourself to log onto Facebook a couple of minutes after the agreed upon time, even though you have been staring at your laptop for quite awhile.

Kiss him in a small room at work meant for short, casual meetings.  Think that this qualifies.  Climb into his lap and lean in close and very tentatively begin to kiss.  Note how his kissing style differs from your own, from other boys.  Adjust.  Find the rhythm.  Learn.  Decide you love how he kisses.  Decide that it’s perfect.  Decide that many ways he touches you are perfect.  Have moments inside those kisses where you cannot believe it is possible to feel this wonderful.

Remember that you too are in a committed relationship.  Not married, but living with your boyfriend of four years.  You are half of a couple. You are in a relationship. This is how you are identified, even if the coupling, the having of relations, has all but vanished from your flesh’s lexicon.  Even if you have both tacitly eased into being friends & roommates, but the kind of friends who take one another for granted due to deep-seated resentments, the kind of roommates who have self-righteous stand-offs over washing mounting stacks of dishes.

Have a series of earnest conversations with your new boy about leaving your respective mates.  Have these conversations immediately before or immediately after having sex in his car.  You’ve begun to wear skirts most days.  This is partially to look cute for your new boy, but largely due to rushed & cramped sex-logistics.  Your co-workers have noticed your change in attire.  “Girl, look at you! You look so pretty!” one of your favorite co-workers exclaims.  Blush & beam at the same time.  You notice that you have begun to carry yourself differently—with a secret bounce, a shy swagger.

Become even more brazenly inappropriate at work.  At some point each day, sneak off to kiss and grope and gaze at one another with a hungry desperation that will only seem laughable in hindsight.  Spend far more time crafting witty & suggestive IM banter than tending to your actual work.  Begin to resent your job for getting in the way of your on-the-clock love life. 

Stay busy, frantically so.  Occupy every single waking moment of your life with activity, friends, or the boy.  Allow no time for introspection or contemplation.  Know on some level that this is crucial to abiding these circumstances, which on some days—the days after sleepless nights & trembling, coffee-bolstered mornings—seem untenable.  Make a plan to leave your boyfriend as soon as you find another place to live.  Have this plan dramatically accelerated when he finds a fervent chat with the boy that you failed to close on your laptop.  Cry torrentially when he tells you that he has discovered the worst & most elaborately duplicitous thing you have ever done.  Feel the compact, guarded ache in your gut explode through your meticulous, flimsy levies.

Flee the apartment & drive to a dimly lit dead-end street to call the boy for reassurance.  He is at home with his wife and son.  Had you failed to mention his child?  Of course you had.  It complicated things in critical & practical ways, but also, in ways that compromised the health of your soul.  So it was best to vilify the wife for all the reasons the boy told you he no longer loved her,& to forget about the two-year-old son altogether.  When you allowed yourself to think of him, it was always in a fantasy of becoming a beloved second, even preferred, mother to him. Of edging the real mother out in some way that signified you were real& immovable.  Those imagined narratives were necessary, as you had begun to feel nebulous as a person, gaining & losing density depending on how much love the boy bestowed upon you that day, on how much you believed the promises he made to leave her.

He answers his phone in a whisper and tells you he will take the dog for a walk and call you back.  You wonder if his wife has grown suspicious of his newfound love of nighttime dog walks.  You are certain she must know something is very wrong in her marriage.  Has she figured it out?  Sometimes, in addition to the guilt you feel over the adultery, you find yourself rooting for her.  You hope she will find out and wordlessly leave him, filing for divorce in a detached & dignified manner.  You hope that she will never let him see her cry, because he isn’t worth her tears.  You hope for this not because it would make it easier to be with him, but because you have already grown to hate him as intensely as you love him, and because you are incapable of mustering the courage & emotionless discipline to leave him.

When you tell him what has happened, to his credit, he only momentarily sounds as though he thinks you did it intentionally, to force his hand.  You strenuously tell him and yourself that this oversight was accidental because you never wished to hurt your boyfriend this way.  But you wonder if the dark & suffocating guilt of it all has spread like smoke into every alcove of your being, fogging your vigilance so you could finally open a valve and release these scalding shadows. 

Later that summer he announces that his wife has plans to take their son to Iowa for a visit with her sister.  You savor the idea of having whole days to spend with him instead of stolen minutes at work, or that swift hourglass of time after work spent drinking dark, sweet beer on the patio of a pub, & then sojourning to his car—that absurdly small & cramped Camry.  In the twilight, parked in the far back of the pub & obscured slightly by trees, you sometimes feel invincible.  And at other times you feel…..not quite invisible, but like you are disappearing.  Shadows move in the back window of the pub’s kitchen.  A busboy watching or a curtain closed. 

You drive six hours to visit your friend for a long weekend.  Those four days are as much an attempt at respite from your obsessive lust and despair as they are a tactic to make him miss you fiercely & expedite leaving his wife.  When you return, you meet at a park & tromp through the high grasses to the perfect secluded clearing where you had had sex— or had begun to have sex and then abruptly stopped and cried—for the first time.  You have brought a small bag of pungent weed with you, a parting gift from your friend.   Although you have smoked a handful of times in the past, you are by no means an expert, & you rely on him to carefully roll the joint.  He does so almost tenderly with his long, thin fingers, which match his lanky body.  He is exactly one foot taller than you, and so much skinnier than any guy you have ever been with.  You have never been attracted to anyone like him before, & you cannot understand why he exerts such a hold over you.  The only thing you can point to is the way he looks at you.  No one has ever looked at you so directly & so deeply.  His gaze makes you look away, embarrassed, and then look back, defiant& emboldened.  It makes you feel vulnerable& audacious in an instant, every time.  And that slam of adrenaline gets you high as the moon.

You get very, very stoned.  The anxious brand of high that requires you to do something distracting & engrossing enough to keep your mind from sprinting down too-dark or wincingly bright corridors.  Sex seems like the only viable option.  Focus your ricocheting mind on disrobing him. Purposefully unbutton his shirt; matter-of-factly unbuckle his belt.  Pull him atop you so you can feel his weight, which you are relying upon to keep yourself from zinging up into the stratosphere.  Dispense with the tender kisses immediately.  You need unyielding pressure to muffle the sound of your heartbeat between your temples.  Mosquitoes permeate the night, planting itchy kisses all over your skin.  Eventually, the insects drive you back inside his car.  Begin posing hypothetical questions to him under the guise of it being a fun game.  Start off lightheartedly, but soon take a turn for the morbid.  You are still very high, & from way up here you can see the universe rapidly expanding& you are trying to chase after it with a reluctant, dawdling lover in tow.  He will not entertain your darkness& halts you sternly.  You feel hurt and impudent.

When his wife and child finally leave town you let him bring you to his place.  Your countless reservations take a backseat to your burning need to see his home, which has achieved an almost mythical status in your mind.  A place so little discussed, yet oppressively omnipresent.    

When he shows you in, it is a struggle to adjust your imagined version of his house to the actuality of it.  The thorough and detailed abode in your mind was nothing like this.  This architecture is completely incorrect, the floor plan jumbled & backwards.  Tell him so.  Do it in a way you know he’ll find funny & adorable.  In a way that will elicit from him a look that says he loves your imagination& your satirization of yourself, & the very fact that you had been thinking about the place he spends his time when he isn’t with you.  Understand in that moment that much of who you are with him is performance. You have mastered this blend of exaggerated whimsy with sardonic undertones, accompanied by a subtle nod to your devotion to him.  Sometimes it makes you feel deceitful to play up the qualities you know he treasures.  Other times, you feel a thrill over knowing precisely how to exercise your power. Mostly, though, you relish seeing yourself through his eyes.  You are your best self, in some ways, when you are with him.  This charming and confident nymphet is someone you quite enjoy portraying.  Moral considerations aside, you highly prefer her over your genuine self—the one burdened with self-doubt& integrity.

You meet his pets with bated breath, understanding that animals are highly attuned to energy. You worry that your throbbing aura of guilt will tip them off & they will react violently or with watchful contempt.  Thankfully this isn’t the case.  Both dogs—the squat salt & pepper loaf with large, ever-alarmed eyes & the caramel Labrador-Pointer with a gracious, disarming face— are excited to meet you.  The diminutive black cat becomes especially attached and hurdles child-gates to follow you to the bathroom.  You trust their instincts over your own.  You allow their pet-love to become very significant in your mind.  You shape it into a good omen, into absolution.

On each of the three nights you stay over, the boy excuses himself to answer a call from his wife.  You cannot make out the words, but during the first conversation you hear the strain in his voice as he speaks to her from the far bedroom.  The second time she calls he goes out to the backyard to pace.  You look out the kitchen window, watching his face cloud, becoming the overcast of a sky resigned to hold its ground against the sun, but unable to summon the strength to rain.  On the third night, you tell him to stay with you in the living room while he speaks with his wife.  You say this firmly & he complies.  Less than a minute into the conversation you regret making this demand.  You don’t want to hear his defeated voice.  You wave to get his attention and mouth the word “Go”.  He nods sadly and walks to the back of the house. 

Anger and sorrow and searing empathy converge and contort in your gut, tying a hard knot there.  You walk over to the shelf that holds their wedding album.  You’ve known it was there all these days, but respectfully left it untouched.  Now you open it deliberately, careful not to rush the experience.  You linger on each photograph masochistically, unconcerned with him finding you paging through his past and confirming that he had been very happy with her at one time.  And you see how happiness is the least reliable gauge of future, the most easily & imperceptibly derailed.  How it dies by degrees. You force yourself to look at his wife in each picture, to notice her guileless smile and excited blue eyes.  You say “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry” over and over in your head.  You put the album back in its place and head directly to the fridge where you open a strong beer and drain it in a long series of gulps that leaves you out of breath.

Your boyfriend wants you to stay, despite your indiscretions, as long as you promise they will cease.  Make this promise knowing you can’t keep this promise.  Numbly allow him to re-woo you with gifts of tiramisu and four packs of Guinness.  Some favorite things he remembers about you from a time when he cared about knowing your favorite things.  Watch television when you are together so you don’t have to make eye contact or speak or notice the other person is there all that often.  Sob disproportionately at a series finale so that he guesses correctly that you are leaving him again.

Follow through with your decision and move out of your shared apartment and in with your grandmother.  Believe you’ve finally summoned the elusive confidence and spunk that will transfer over to giving the boy an ultimatum, and of leaving him if he fails to comply, if he fails at loving you.  Listen to Aretha Franklin at top volume in your car, whizzing past trees and Starbucks and an insurance company and all the other strangely wooden scenery of your life. 

Leave work early one day and sit on the floor in the bedroom you’re occupying in your grandma’s loving home.  The room where your grandpa spent the last days of his life in hospice care.  The room where you and your brother took turns retelling funny childhood stories to his ravaged and beautiful face.  He was listening even though he couldn’t respond.  He gave the ghost of a flicker of a smile at one of your memories and you came undone.  But you excused yourself and went into the bathroom to weep quietly into a hand towel like an adult.

Seated on this bedroom floor, begin to take your sleeping pills methodically, one at a time.  Stop at eight pills and text your ex boyfriend, telling him what you’ve just done.  Eight pills seems like a respectable suicide attempt.  It seems like whether you die or live, it will be fate.  And you are going to see if fate looks like a rescue or nothing at all. 

Surface inside some version of conscious in the hospital and have fog-tinged memories of your mom and dad and brother being there.  Experience guilt and remorse deeper than any abyss you had heretofore spent time in.  Spend months clawing upward.

Meet a different boy not too terribly long after this prolonged season of pain and diminishment.  Know he is everything the old boy could never be.  Know he is everything you've ever wanted and felt undeserving of.  Feel your heart gasp like a revived patient when he tells you he loves you.  The wince of your history comes on its tail, though.  Feel a responsibility to protect him from your brand of misdeed and misery.    

Take sleeping pills again, an uncounted heap in your palm this time, because the new boy is so good and he shouldn’t have to endure your sludge of shame and darkness for an instant, let alone a lifetime.  Decide to do everyone this great favor, to make this grand sacrifice. 

When he comes to see you in the hospital you rip apart from the inside, all your seams bursting wide, spilling out singing light and choking tar and sourest bile and all manner of storms.  Look up at the fluorescent lights with their unflinching illumination.  Look down at your IV with its relentless sustenance.  Close your eyes and catch the silhouette of a girl softly smiling under a silver moon in the distance.  Make plans to meet her there, years from now.