I have always revisited it lovingly, but with trepidation. That was the winter I reread Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, one of my favorite novels, and the one that makes me most lonely. Through my own puppyish judgment I had rendered romance and marriage alien circumstances.
The blame for this misery was mine entirely.
From that bed I had submitted to my husband’s directions and composed an email to Paul, bleached of all sentiment, terminating our relationship and any further correspondence. Now I was confined to suicide watch, my only visitors an understandably infuriated husband and my best friend. That December, after a tremulous and fleeting affair, I confessed the transgression to my husband and performed penance via one bottle of Tylenol. Paul and I met the fall of 2010, one month after I had married someone else. But with eyes clamped shut his ghost seemed close company, and I could entertain the fantasy that we haunted each other. He or I might as well have been apparitions, so total was our estrangement. His body, I knew, hovered that very minute over clouds and terrain as a plane carried him back to Colorado and away from me. As I lay supine in the intensive care unit, an IV threaded into the skin of my forearm, his face flickered in the damp vagueness between eye and lid.
0 kommentar(er)
