Explaining

On Saturday morning, Sihaya and I perched on a picnic table, waiting for our Tai Chi class to begin.

“Everyone asked about you at Bill’s retirement party last night,” I said.

She nodded, knowingly. Thoughtfully. “Have you gotten tired of explaining, yet?” she asked.

I sighed. How should I answer that? “There’s not much to explain,” I said, flatly.

I wanted to ask if she could offer something for me to say when people ask why she’s not with me at social functions any more, but I knew that she couldn’t.

At least, not one she’s willing to share with me.

I wanted to tell her that I don’t say much because I don’t want her to feel uncomfortable around my friends and family if she changes her mind.

I had a sense that something was happening with her for a week or two before she lowered the boom. She’d been distant…loving, but lost in her own thoughts, which she attributed to two funerals in two days and the anniversary of The End of Her Marriage. Two Thursdays ago, she missed our good night call. When I called her at 11, she didn’t answer, and the next day she explained that she’d stayed late to talk with her dance teacher, which sometimes happens.

Her e-mails that Friday were terse, the polar opposite of the warmth she’d conveyed in all our daily exchanges since that first introductory e-mail. She seemed distant, scattered. We agreed to see each other that night, that she’d call when she left work so that we could watch Game 5 together…we planned for me to bring dinner.

When she called, it was already the fourth inning, and she suggested a total change in plans. She’d come to my place, maybe we could go out for dinner someplace where the game would be on. I suggested a place to eat, and she had trouble remembering it, though we’d eaten there two weeks before. She seemed lost.

When she said she’d still have to go home and feed the cats after we had dinner, I suggested that we go with the original plan and let me bring dinner to her. She was clearly tired, and I didn’t want her to have to face the drive home after dinner and the game…it seemed to me that she wouldn’t be able to really relax at my place if she came down, so I pressed her to go with the original plans. She agreed. (Besides, we hadn’t seen each other since Sunday, and that had been very brief…I missed my Sweetie, and I wanted to spend the night. There was Cuddle Time at stake.)

When I arrived with dinner, she was clearly tired. She greeted me with a very long, sad hug. And then another.

After dinner, she quietly said that she hadn’t been so depressed and sad since before her marriage ended. She couldn’t explain what was causing her sadness, this time, just that she felt that she was losing herself in the relationship. “I think…we…should…stop seeing each other,” she said.

There wasn’t much conviction in her voice, and as we talked, she began to reconsider. She asked me to stay the night…not to have me there, but because she didn’t want to be alone.

On our way home from Tai Chi that Saturday morning, she said that maybe we shouldn’t break up, that maybe what we had was worth holding on to. She asked for some time to herself to think, and the next morning told me that her decision was to stop seeing each other.

I was understandably shocked; just days before, we’d talked about the enduring nature of our relationship. I said some things in the moment that I regret, though not such bitter things as to be unforgivable, I think. Their memory will pass. They remain the only harsh words ever spoken between us.

The following Tuesday, we met at her place so that I could drop off some things of hers and I could pick up the last of my stuff.

We talked for more than two hours, calmly and respectfully. She allowed me to ask my questions, and tried to answer them thoughtfully and honestly. For all her trying, she seemed unable to offer more than, “I don’t know.”

I got the distinct sense that she was holding back, shielding me from something.

Coming, as this does, as we both recognized the end of the Limerance Phase of our romance, I wonder whether or not this is merely her way of processing the crisis of continuance that sometimes follows the end of the endorphin rush.

More than one of the people I’ve talked to think it is, or something close to that. Their opinions are based on what I’ve told them…as true an accounting as I can provide, to be sure…so I have some doubt as to whether or not they are simply reading my hopes.

Two or three friends have asked if I thought she had maybe cheated on me, and knowing my painful background with infidelity, is trying to protect me the only way she knows how – by ending the relationship to avoid reopening an old wound.

I must admit that the sense I have that she’s holding something back does make me wonder, but I would hope that she’d have given me the choice of how to process that information instead of assuming incorrectly that I’d be better off having such a decision made for me. No, I doubt that she’s been unfaithful.

And so, on Saturday morning, that conversation on the picnic table may have meant something deeper. “Have you gotten tired of explaining, yet?” I wonder if she was looking for common ground, something to grab on to before we spin all the way out of each other’s lives.

My answer, in the moment, must have stung.

Yes, Beloved, I am tired of explaining, when in the place of an explanation, all I have is the hope of us.

I love you, and miss you.

“When you find yourself
In some far off place,
And it causes you
To rethink some things,
You start to sense that slowly
You’re becoming someone else…
And then you find yourself.

Well, you go through life
So sure of where you’re heading
And you wind up lost
And it’s the best thing that coulda happened
‘Cause sometimes when you lose your way
It’s really just as well…
Because you find yourself,
Yeah, that’s when you find yourself.

When you meet the one
That you’ve been waiting for
And she’s everything
That you want and more
You look at her and you finally start
To live for someone else
And then you find yourself,
Yeah, that’s when you find yourself.”
-- Brad Paisley