While I Was Gone

We talk. We talk. And the words make our silences easier—they’re the current that runs under them.

When I was most confused by her, it helped me to remember myself at her age—just that egocentric, just that lost, just that uncaring about the pain I might be causing others, because I felt I was in so much pain myself

“Love is love, Daniel, wherever it lands.”

There are always compromises, of course, but they are at the heart of what it means to be married. They are, occasionally, everything.

I felt the kind of desperation, I think, that cancels the possibility of empathy.

I was grateful for every minute of it, every minute away from the consciousness of my own failures, away from my misery.

And so it began before I recognized it—my second chance

I was remembering the way it feels at just that moment when you begin to turn, when you’re poised exactly between the things in life you want to do and those you need to do, and it seems for a few blessed seconds that they are all going to be the same.

This was all of it, no doubt, the strange passing feeling that had come to me in the boat. Age. Vanity. The impossibility of accepting the new versions of oneself that life kept offering. The impossibility of the old version’s vanishing.

I wondered if she’d ever felt this sense of dislocation from her past, from her present, from her own reflection in the mirror.