You Shouldn't Snore And Here's Why
I don’t recognize the man laying next to me and that’s terrifying because he was the one. The one. The one that was supposed to make everything better and make everything make sense. I would never say out loud something like I believed that he would fix me, but deep down that’s exactly what I believed. (Don’t tell anyone. I’ll find out that it was you if you tell someone.) I love him. Maybe. I know that I used to love him but I also know that love changes shape and that things change in general and so now all that I know is that I love that I used to love him. Or I feel alright about it. And I like that I felt love at all because I know that most people never do. Most people convince themselves that they are feeling love when what they are actually experiencing is comfortable infatuation. A kind of crush that allows you to check off boxes and move on with the rest of your life. Now get married. Now have kids. Now move to Long Island.
We saw a marriage counselor seven years ago and went for three sessions before both of us decided that the marriage counselor was an idiot and that we knew better how to fix our situation than she did. We didn’t fix our situation. We went and saw The Help instead. But we were also right - that marriage counselor was an idiot. Meeting with her felt like trying to fix a flooded basement and suggesting that maybe, in the future, we should try and not have the basement flood. I remember the flooded basement analogy vividly because our basement had just flooded from Hurricane Sandy. On the car ride home from the second session we joked about this. Neither one of us said that the next session would be our last one but we both knew.
I bring up the marriage counselor thing only because I know that some of my friends will read this. And although they are my friends, and I love them, I know that they will comfort themselves by saying that I’m feeling this way because John and I just didn’t work hard enough. I want to assure you, friends and readers, that we worked and that just because we worked and now I feel like I’ve lost touch with the grunting man snoring next to me in this stifling room on this stifling block in this stifling subdivision of this stifling town it doesn’t mean that your marriage is in any danger of crumbling to the ground. It might but the particulars of my story doesn’t mean that it will. You can keep reading.
He chokes briefly on a pool of saliva in the back of his throat and for about seven seconds I dream about him dying. But the bastard keeps breathing and so I think about what it would have been like if we had met today. Like if we had been teenagers today and had met in today’s world. Times have changed. I keep telling my kids that when I try and understand what they are going through. My son is twenty eight years old and is single and has mostly been single. Most of the time this doesn’t seem to bother him all that much but he will occasionally drop a hint that makes me wonder if it actually does. I don’t want to ask flat out because I worry that this will make the problem worse (if there is a problem) so I try and find other ways of asking. I haven’t found out anything so I still worry without knowing if I should.
John and I met when we were still malleable, not-fully-formed humans and I think that there is a great deal to be said for that. I think we share a bond because we grew up together and so we weather storms much better than other couples who met later in life. They get divorced. Our love is deeper and more tangled into who we are. I sometimes wonder who I would be if he wasn’t snoring next to me. Would I cease to exist? I think I would be okay but I don’t actually know because that isn’t something that I have even remotely explored.
Our love story was a romantic comedy up until the point at which it stopped being one although I challenge anyone to pinpoint exactly when that point was because I sure as hell can’t. There was no burning bush or hotel room charged to a credit card in the middle of an unremarkable Thursday in April. There was only this whatever this was. Bland uncertainty and boredom. Not a nightmare but no dream either. Just the reality of both of us being too old and too tired and too comfortable in our discomfort to change.
They say that you fall in love with six different people over your lifetime and I love that John has been all six people.
But now what?
