By Shoshauna Shy
Someone is tracking me through my days, and I am tracking him. That’s what I like about marriage. I know my husband is walking Westmorland Park with a former coworker; he knows I’m bicycling to the library off Spooner Street. He’s shopping at Home Depot for a snowblower; I’m feeding cats at a neighbor’s house. When we’re apart, we care about what each other is doing. There’s the unspoken understanding that no matter what, we’ll have dinner together at the end of the day.
His interest in my life folds around me like a plush blanket. I catalog and stash slices of my hours apart to share over the spinach quiche and yams: what the backyard neighbor said about pampas grass; the listing for the house on Yarbor Lake; that his youngest sister invited us for brunch. It’s all getting cupped in my palm to spill like dice over dinner plates because nothing completely happens till I talk to him about it.
In the 3am stillness when he’s left our bed to pace and pivot downstairs, and the tentacles of death lay its light fingers on certain organs, or in those empty spaces where organs used to be, I imagine what it could be like when he does not come back to bed; when he does not come to bed at all; is not here to go to bed. Yes, I have ten close friends, eleven sorta-close friends, five sisters-in-law, a son, a daughter, a brother–but all of them have their own well-established routines, projects, plans, and high-priority commitments. Most of them have their own partners and holiday traditions. Many of them live hours away. There won’t be enough new spaces carved out to include a solo widow–not without obligation, anxiety or, worse yet, pity.
And I will learn that no one else understands what unearthing a letter from my dad tucked into an old journal means to me; why the phrase “Bertha in a shack” cracks me up nonstop; what it took for me to craft a new career after getting canned from the one I loved. I will never again be who I was with my husband, or known by anybody in the way he knew me; be the me he knew. And I will miss that me with all my heart.
I will find that while I usually cherish time alone, alone time will take on a whole new dimension. It will be austere, sparse, parched. I will construct events for my future so I can write them in boxes on a kitchen calendar and have something to look forward to–but a lot of boxes will yawn empty, and maybe once those spoken-for days arrive, I’ll wonder what convinced me they were worth any anticipation. Meanwhile, there will be no hurrying to get home after a movie at the multiplex, or breakfast at a French bistro with a new friend. Instead, there will be dread, dread of how long I’ll ramble room to room before I speak to another person again, especially since texting and writing emails have aggressively upstaged the telephone.
And there will be dread of even leaving the house at all, since there will not be anyone to track me as I spiral about town–not his interest, his curiosity nor his love, cozy and warm as fleece.