An exercise from Old Friend From Far Away by Natalie Goldberg.
Tell me about how a relationship ended. (Names changed.)
There were a lot of ways it ended. I stopped loving him, for one. Over a year prior, in fact, without realizing it, without realizing love like that really comes to an end without you choosing to stop it. The way I started getting angry when he left hair in the bathroom sink, when the dirty dishes weren’t in the dishwasher. How I felt when he told me again and again with his camo-green eyes, No, I haven’t been smoking, after I detected the scent behind his tight-lipped kiss.
How it really ended, though, really physically ended, went something like this: he opened the back door after work, sent me a shifty glance and a muffled reply. I continued my work on the computer as I heard him close the bedroom door and shuffle around. He hadn’t been as talkative after spending the night in a local jail, which I called at the suggestion of a friend who didn’t know where he was when I awoke to an empty bed, and no sign of his usual slump on the beige futon. It was only a week after that event, after I called his parents, shaky, telling them he’d been arrested for his second DUI and driving without a license, and his mother said to me one last time, “Why didn’t you…” …nothing, knowing at last I couldn’t stop him from what he wanted, couldn’t share the blame.
He came out of the bedroom and sat on the couch, where he’d set up a new computer on the coffee table, and I went to the bathroom. The shower curtain looked odd–weighted, as if something was pushing against it, pulling on it, and when I tugged it open I found the bathtub full of clothes–his–a large pile of sweaters and jeans and socks strewn across the porcelain, stretching to the drain and faucet. I knew it was his weird, symbolic way of trying to leave.
When I asked him about it he said, “Have you slept with him?”
“What?” The answer was no, and I wouldn’t have, but I was in love with someone else. And I didn’t know how he knew.
Finally, I said, “I don’t think this is working. It hasn’t been for a long time.” It was like a bad movie.
His eyes glassed over. I felt nothing.
“But I still love you,” he squeezed out, head in his hands. I saw none of that–no more midnight drives with Pink Floyd filling the car. No more daytime picnics on the grass in Hidden Springs (I’d never tell you where it is). No more floating down Boise’s Snake River in rubber tubes or scrounging for rare rock albums at the Record Exchange. No more truthful smiles, no more passionate sex. No more of what I could barely remember.
“You don’t love me, Dave,” I said gently, pulling on my jacket. “You just need me.”
And, pushing my way through the back door, the night, I left him there, the way someone leaves a pair of socks with holes in the toes in a bag next to banana peels and empty tomato soup cans, when nothing more can be done for them. The way someone says, Look, I’m sorry, when they’re not. The way someone, quiet at first, tears from a womb.
(Sorry, I know this is one-sided, unjustified and somewhat vague. This is probably the end of something I need a lot more space to write.)
