To Love Somebody

 Entry 1.    9:22 a.m.

After I discovered the affair and stopped sleeping in the marital bed, Jenny would often sleep with a picture of us on her side of the bed. It was poignant, but she wouldn't stop the affair. She was dying. I felt so sad for her. Believing in her sincerity, which had long ago departed, I agonized over her sorrow. I loved her. Despite this, or perhaps because I loved her, I never gave in, never slept in the bed until she turned toward death. But, I was heartbroken and privately questioning if my resolve was cruelty. To find out as she was

dying, that these emotions of hers, this sorrow and regret, were some sort of fun house kaleidoscopic mirror, less substantial than shadows of gossamer, made me feel the fool who had no limits to his guilelessness. We want to believe the people who we are with love us. To find that we can at best read tea leaves leaves me with little hope for a future of trust. That old saw, "You don't really know anyone," actually means something. I sit here paralyzed over her loss, crying over her absence, her eternal departure, and I didn't ever know her. Ever.

Horses have blinders to prevent them from getting spooked by movement just at the edge of their eyes. The metaphor is just too obvious, but we avoid what is in front of ourselves all the time. People lie to themselves about the mundane and the profound. People deny aging or pretend they are skinny. Jenny denied she was dying. I denied that it was possible she was stepping out, or that she could be so cunning. This human frailty I suppose persists because it helps us cope, or rather not cope, with the pain in front of us.

It's Tuesday. I have to run errands today. It is unavoidable. Meds and bank deposit. I will motivate soon. Very soon.