Step Back and Dance Forth

It had been almost a year and a half since she had last been in his company. Hearing his voice on the phone yesterday had been a shock. Her old number - the one that used to be associated with own self - had come up on her call display. The dialogue had been easier than she anticipated that it would be, notwithstanding the occasional strained silence when they both contemplated the absolute surreality of actually interacting with each other again. It was facile in that it was like interacting within some sort of hyper reality...deep inside a dream, or a memory. On the phone he was still a phantasm of her past.

Today he entered a more present reality. She saw the green van pull up and gathered her courage. It smelled the same; it was a smell that evoked a thousand memories. It was the first sensory reminder of the absence of her dogs...and with that, her entire former life. It was a van that they had taken many trips in...drives toward Christmas dinners, treks out to the country, and trips out of province to pick up beautiful new puppies. This was the van that they had both made love and fought within. This is was the van she had left him in.

He was sitting in it now, like a strange simulation of a person that she used to know so well. He looked the same, but was not; he was now a familiar but distant image of himself. Waiting for her quietly, he smiled his most uncomfortable smile when she got into the passenger seat; a smile that stabbed her with nostalgic sadness. Saying "hello" had never felt so hard. Seeing him for the first time in hundreds upon hundreds of days seemed to initiate a slide show of images to pass through her mind. She remembered meeting him for the first time...walking down the aisle to meet him on their wedding day...and days when she looked at him through tears, wondering how he could treat her with words, so caustic and unkind. She remembered the day that she said goodbye.

The man at the counter asked them how they knew each other. This was a question he surely didn't anticipate would cause in each of them such screamingly obvious discomfort. After another long silence, he answered first. "We're married," he said. The tone, flat and coldly legalistic, made her feel ill. These words are not meant to be said like this.

The words were foreign; the language no longer fit the context, for it had been a long time since she had considered herself to be married to him...a long time since she had slipped her finger into that ring, and an even longer time since she'd felt the desire to. Suddenly she couldn't bring herself to look him in the eye. He could have removed his heart at that moment, and placed it on the counter for the man to observe the bludgeoned pieces that she had left it in, and the callouses that had grown over the places of hurt and vulnerability. There had never been any doubt that he loved her with an incomparable intensity; the doubt had only existed in the manner in which he did so. They were both so young.

She wondered if when he got home, if her dogs would smell her - and sense her absence the way that she had sensed theirs...or whether they had actually now forgotten her completely. Maybe dogs can do that. The tears that came in a downpour upon exiting the vehicle were convoluted and surprising. They were not tears of regret - but rather made up of years of extreme emotion that she'd wrapped up carefully, and had since just put away; they lived in opposite pairs, as had they, tied up like old yellowed letters. Memories of incredible happiness conjoined with memories of extreme pain.

Today I saw my husband. Today I am almost delirious in the contemplation of how many different lives can be led within the grand singular, and how much can change with the mere passing of time. I have a fresh rug burn on my knee that makes me happy, and an old wound somewhere else that will surely scab over again...scars I never want to forget; both remind me, that I am alive.