Writing About Not Writing

 The simplest way to say it is abrupt. Like dropping a coffee cup on your foot. Now your toe hurts, you have a mess on the floor, and no coffee. But it's over. You can't spill it any further than the floor.

In therapy, I tried to explain my fear of putting the words down. Saying them out loud or writing them down... it became real. Suddenly I was responsible for the action of my words. Unsaid: they were bullets unfired, matches unlit. 

Knowing that it is over doesn't make the ending any easier. The words are still full of resentment and frustration and anger. None of that matters when it is actually OVER. When there is still hope, still some glimmer that things might change, resentment, frustration, anger and fear all play tag inside the mind. Some days, I feel like the last kid waiting to be chosen for a team, knowing full well I cant play worth a damn... but I dont want to be picked last. 

Each night, as the house winds down, I have been trying to sit and write. To compose ideas as much as to compose myself. But really, it is avoiding going upstairs to bed. Avoiding the conflict, avoiding the crying rage that inflicts my wife. Avoiding the stories I have heard hundreds of times now. Stories of abuse, neglect, trauma, and fear. All of her anxiety floods our bed with woe. She won't kiss me anymore. Not for years now. She blames the chiropractor who touched her years before we were married. I look around our house and I see memories of the love and compassion, now covered in shadows and cobwebs. 

She doesn't remember anything more than about 2 or three years ago. Except for her childhood. That is bright as sunshine and hot as summer asphalt. Indelible. College trauma is still like a new penny. But our life together for over twenty years may as well be written in cuneiform. It requires translation. Anything that jogs her memory only makes her afraid that she is losing more of her memory every day. If I say "remember when we _____?" The inevitable answer is no, followed by angry tears. Anger at me for remembering, anger at herself for having no memory of it at all, and then even more anger and fear that somehow everything about this recollection is a judgment. 

It has made me afraid to recall the time before now. We were happy once. Sure, there were antidepressants, anti-anxiety meds, you name it. There were explosive violent times dealing with my ex-wife. There was the coma. There were all the surgeries after the coma. But we were happy once. There was always a future to look towards. 

So now that I have written this and stamped it into being... I have to say that writing it is easy. I haven't written much in the last two decades. Work stuff, emails and shit. Writing feelings, meaningful writing has eluded me probably for the same reason her memories refuse to come when she calls. They are afraid. I have been afraid to write the honest things that I feel out of fear that they will reveal things I am terrified to see in the daylight. 

A title is just a placeholder for what everything really means when you get to the end. Here we are, at the end. It's over. Maybe the title will change, maybe the ending will change.