We don’t touch as we pass each other by. Even in tight places – a hallway, the laundry room – we are careful to make sure that not a shoulder should rub, or a hip bump up against one another. It is dangerous, yes, and not easy work. But it is necessary, and we both realize it is what must be done. Our lives have come to this, we realize, and we are content, it seems, to live quietly alongside one another. The kids are too young to realize anything, and it does not seem that divorce is the way to go – too expensive, too much work – so we agree, silently that is, to just go about our daily lives and try to make the best of things. As they are.
And how are things really? How can things really be when your life takes a momentous change after so many years.
Change, this thing that usually I relish and welcome…. I do not know if I recognize change in this form.
I look out the window, across the street. A newlywed couple, a baby in a stroller kicking her feet and throwing her bottle over and over onto the driveway. The couple laugh, continue to pick up the bottle, arms around one another.
A garage sale next door to where we lived, old junk strewn out and down the length of the drive, to the curb where, had this been a neighborhood like the one I had grown up in, stuff would have disappeared every time you turned your back.
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