lie no. 27 | 11.21.19
That month-long layover between Hong Kong and Mexico was even worse than expected. I got pneumonia, I got the flu—even my body was sick and tired of my bullshit—and I got into as many fights with Matt as I could muster.
To be fair, it wasn’t all bad. I also had one of my favorite Christmases ever, booked a trip to San Miguel de Allende that would kickstart a hell of a year and turned 35—my favorite age to date.
Quick note here: It is really hard to rehash the lows in life, and these are some of the darkest moments of mine—especially when I’m sharing it months later from the other side, living back in the light I couldn’t see back then. But that is why I share it (even if it takes months to write): It feels just as important, arguably more so, to share the lows alongside the highs. It’s not always easy or fair for the people I love most when I write about the past and my intention is not, nor has it ever been, to go backward or dredge up the past. I simply hope by sharing the bad with the good—and it’s about to get really, really good—it might serve as a reminder to someone who needs it that life is anything but linear.
Matt and I barely made it to midnight on New Years Eve. We watched the ball drop in Times Square from a bed in The Bahamas. Earlier that day, I asked about his highs and lows of 2018. I genuinely wanted to start a conversation, not a fight. I’ve been known to start the former when what I’m really craving is the latter, but this wasn’t that.
His low? The days that followed my return from Hong Kong. His high? I honestly don’t remember, which means it had nothing to do with me and/or I stopped listening after learning I had something to do with my husband’s worst moment of the year.
His answer surprised me, not because it wasn’t valid but because in a year of the highest of highs and lowest of lows, I wouldn’t have ranked that particular time to be the worst of it, maybe just the most recent. Now I see and appreciate that about Matt, he has the ability to let things go. Whereas my tried-and-true torture method has always been rehashing, verbal waterboarding, he moves on quickly. He doesn’t keep score like I do. He doesn’t punish like I do.
Re-entry after traveling has never been my strong suit. I can be pretty incorrigible under the best circumstances and I wasn’t exactly in the best head space when I went to Hong Kong. I struggle to come down from the high of traveling and end up more often violently crashing into people and things when I get home. I tend to like myself more when I travel, or at least I used to, so returning home from anywhere always meant grieving the loss of that better version of me, of leaving her behind somewhere, anywhere, better than here. Unfortunately grief for me often looks a lot like anger. I first really noticed this after I got back from North Carolina after the hurricane and Matt was out boating with some buddies.
BOATING. B-O-A-T-I-N-G.
At the time, my exhausted head and heart could not process the juxtaposition of this with where I’d just been, with everything I’d just seen and experienced. An unfair split screen started playing in my head the second I walked in the door. It wasn’t his absence when I got home after so long away that sent me over the edge.
It was a stack of laundry I’d done nine days earlier still sitting exactly where I’d left it on the kitchen table.
Laundry, notably, washed in clean water, fluffed dry courtesy of the electricity powering our entire home and stacked on a table where there was never a shortage of food in a room with a roof over it—a stack of clean clothes a lot of people I’d just met would give anything to have. My entire worldview had shifted in a short period of time, so the fact that everything was exactly as I left it here meant everything looked off, out of place. Nothing looked right, which meant everything looked wrong.
That stack of laundry went on to make its way into an impressive (and in hindsight, hilarious) number of arguments. When I searched the folder of notes on my phone where I do most of my writing, the word ‘laundry’ comes up more than a dozen times between September and December of last year. I forgot it even made an appearance in that letter I wrote Matt last fall when I’d finally started to articulate how I’d been feeling.
“I just don’t want you to feel the way I did when I came home to laundry on the table and it broke my heart,” I wrote to him a few weeks after returning, clearly [I thought] describing something bigger than laundry.
It took months for me to realize Matt hadn’t made that stack of laundry a metaphor for our struggling marriage, as I had. He genuinely thought I had very strong opinions about laundry, apparently a very delicate load of it.
I couldn’t stop laughing at this realization when I first started writing this a couple months ago. Matt, sitting next to me, asked what was so funny.
“Do you remember that stack of laundry?” I asked.
“Oh, god.”
Hong Kong was different, though. If Hurricane Florence cracked me open, Hong Kong’s where I got curious enough, or maybe brave enough, to look below the surface.
It’s impossible to travel with someone, even yourself—maybe especially yourself—and not get to know them, really get to know them.
Intimacy springs from vulnerability-rich environments it turns out, and in Hong Kong I got a glimpse into the parts of me buried beneath the routines and mundanities of home, the pieces I’d presumed long gone over the years.
When there was no one around to hide behind or blame, I started to shed light on the parts I kept hidden in the shadows and the more I started to question how they’d ended up there in the first place, the more I wanted to see what else was hiding there.
Hong Kong was like a fantastic first date that went by too quickly and left me wanting more. Hilariously, again, only in hindsight, mine and Matt’s first date rather infamously lasted 48 hours as well.
Matt and I started going to couple’s therapy a few weeks before my trip. One week our therapist gave us a homework assignment to make a note of every time we felt connected to the other.
I didn’t really understand the assignment’s point at the time—we’re here, aren’t we? Isn’t it obvious we don’t feel connected? But, never one to ever disappoint a homework assigner, I all but cleared my calendar for this. I might as well have donned a lab coat and safety glasses that week as I took notes of our every move. When we shared our findings I resisted the urge to ask for an overhead projector. I might’ve even made that joke, but it would’ve only been to compensate for the lack of connection in my findings. (“Just kidding” is one of my favorite lies.)
What the exercise taught us, however, was invaluable. We learned a lot about ourselves and each other, namely that we experience connection in drastically different, which is not to say incompatible, ways. I once read that we judge others based on their behavior and ourselves based on our intentions. All those awkward silences I’d been tracking and translating into signs of contempt had been anything but awkward for Matt, to him they signaled contentment. Having this new understanding gave me a sliver of hope for us.
Then I went to Hong Kong.
That 48-hour date with myself, not that I realized it at the time, gave me the permission and confidence to make me, not my marriage, my priority. I couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that I was wasting energy working on my marriage—energy I was going to need for myself. At the time it felt like a choice: me or us. I chose the only one I had complete control over. We put couple’s therapy on hold when I got back—arguably at a time we needed it most, but I needed to take care of myself more.
I met Matt when I was 23, before I got to know myself. We dated for the first four of five years I carried around my father’s secret and got married a year before the the truth came out.
At 34 I sat on a couch and explained this troubling timeline to a total stranger.
“I met Matt right before finding out about my father’s affair,” I said, as if a calendar or my marriage was my problem. “I was a different person. There’s before that and there’s after that. I wish I could change the timing, but it is what it is and it feels cruel to keep this up.”
“What if it was the right time?” my new therapist asked.
I instantly regretted getting a new therapist. I barely had the energy to get to the appointment let alone take it all from the top with someone new. It’s no wonder people don’t prioritize their mental health. You need a deck or at least an executive summary to catch them up so you can skip everything starting with childhood that they want to talk about and get to the present-day problems you’re there to focus on faster.
“Um, well… it wasn’t,” I said trying to be polite, still trying to impress a person I was paying to talk through this with me. “It was the wrong time. It just was. I don’t think it’s going to work but I want to be able to say we tried and salvage our friendship above all else.”
She asked if I wanted it to work. I lied and said of course. I’d given up on us months earlier, Matt had even acknowledged as much. Then he got the hell out of my way, much like I had watched the hurricane approach the coast from a safe distance—maybe to protect himself, maybe because he knew he couldn’t change my mind for me (only I could do that), maybe because he knew it wasn’t actually about him.
“What if you met Matt at just the right time?” she countered, as if I hadn’t understood her question the first time.
We continued a few more rounds of this. I was there to get myself back to normal, even if it meant a new normal without Matt, not to rewrite history. Didn’t she think if there was a chance he had come into my life at the right time I probably wouldn’t be sitting there trying—paying, even—to convince her otherwise?
“This must be exhausting for you,” she finally said.
At the time I was grateful for what sounded like sympathy and recognition of the stress caused by this culmination of external events completely out of my control. I felt heard for the first time in a long time, even as I tried to shake off the absurdity of being anything close to exhausted. I mean, I was averaging 1.3 baths a day. How exhausted could I be, I wondered as I shoved images of Britney Spears circa 2007 out of my mind and made a note to hide all the umbrellas in the house. Now I realize she wasn’t referring to anything external at all. I was exhausting myself.
On New Year’s Day, while Matt had moved on to whatever football games were on TV, I laid out on the dock alone, unable to move on from our conversation the day before. What a weird feeling to know you are the reason for another person’s worst day in the whole lot of 365 of them. Deep down I wasn’t surprised in the slightest, but something had to give.
I couldn’t do this anymore.
Once again, my marriage seemed like the obvious, if not only, thing to sacrifice in the situation. And with that I tried to leave my husband—literally and figuratively—while on holiday with my family in The Bahamas.