But Then There's Me

So, my husband should be going out of town next week. This will be only the third time in our nine-year relationship that we will have been apart overnight.

The first was in December 2016. I went to Florida solo to visit my mom, grandma, and aunt—all of whom are dead now, in that order.

Which feels impossible when I write it that way. At the time, they were simply people I was going to see.

It was very early in our relationship, before we were married. We had been living together for less than two months. It was easy on both of us.

Then, in October 2024, he went to Indiana to look at a house. It was only a few days, and I had work, which I did from home each day. I cleaned the oven, cleaned the whole house, watched the entire first season of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, watched Room and Saltburn, baked cookies, and talked to him on the phone three to five times a day.

In some ways, it was kind of fun.

So, at the prospect of my husband being out of town next week for a few days, I figured it would be the same.

But next week, Juneteenth—a day I have off from work—falls during his trip. I didn't realize this until after all the plans were made: tickets bought, car reserved, hotel booked.

Why does one day—no work, no husband—hold some sort of newness that I'm examining yet can't quite explain?

In my first marriage, to a totally different guy, I was alone a lot. I was on my own a lot. There were months when he didn't step foot into the apartment where we lived, and I saw him only a few days a week. In many regards, it was as if I wasn't married at all.

I was married, but I didn't share my life with him, and he did not share a life with me. We were coexisting in the way coworkers might sometimes see each other in meetings, make small talk, help out on a project, then disappear back into their own tasks completely separate from one another.

What do they even do on a daily basis?

We don't really know.

It's only the overlap we see and feel and know.

But this marriage has been different. From the start, we wove our lives together into one. The minutes, the hours, the days, the weeks—it is intrinsically linked. We have time apart, hours here and there. We have separate hobbies, hours here and there. But even apart, there's this line of communication: texts when we get there, when we leave, check-ins, do you need anything, do you want a Coke from the gas station?

Perhaps it's the solitude, quietness, the realization of how noisy my life is.
How full.

Of course, there is the background noise: another person with whom I share my home, moving from room to room, working, taking phone calls with colleagues, watching TV.

But then there's me.

When all that external noise falls away, I fill it with podcasts, TV, YouTube, music, voice messages to friends. I am always filling the void.

I keep picturing ten o'clock on that Friday morning.

No meetings?

No husband in the next room?

No agenda?

Just coffee growing cold somewhere in the house and no particular reason to be anywhere.

Just open-ended moments.

Just who I am when nobody needs anything from me.

Who I am when nobody even wants anything from me.

My mother is gone.

My grandmother is gone.

My aunt is gone.

The first time we spent a night apart, they were all still here.

And, for now, my husband is simply my husband. In the next room. Going on a road trip. Mowing the grass. Stopping at the gas station.

Footsteps echoing from the other side of the house.

But a thirty-six-year age gap has a way of making the future feel less hypothetical.

Maybe that's what feels so strange about next Friday.

Not that he will be gone temporarily.

That someday he will truly be gone forever.

For one quiet Friday, I find myself staring at the smallest possible version of that reality.

No work. No husband. Just me.

Maybe that's what feels so strange about the whole thing.

Not being alone, but remembering I will eventually have to re-learn how.

I only want to be surrounded by women who understand immediately when I say, “my interior world.”

Capricious Patina Excised

Strange how the capricious,
given enough time, reveals its pattern,
and is excised without a blink.

AND THE PROBLEM MIGHT BE ME

When Google Maps detoured us through the middle of nowhere in Tennessee

As we drove from Missouri back to Alabama, I almost said, "If I see one more Trail of Tears sign, I'm going to fucking cry."

But I didn't.

Most would take it as some sort of humorous hyperbole, and I suppose in most ways it kind of is. I mean, look around at this white girl, okay, life. I am tired and stressed, but it's not biblical levels. Every twenty minutes Tennessee itself seems determined to remind me of that.

The signs aren't subtle. TRAIL OF TEARS. Another one. Then another. Little roadside reminders that something happened here bad enough we've nailing explanations to the roadside two hundred years later.

And here I am, irritated at Google Maps.

The soapbox I could try to stand on is barely wide enough for one foot, and it's a little rotten. Not rotten like the floorboards of a shack without insulation, rotten from the weather coming in, but rotten like a child spoiled rotten. Actually spoiled. Horribly spoiled.

That's what I'm standing on.

But nonetheless, just like Stormi Kardashian wiping her brow, flustered, trying to move frappuccinos out the tiny, luxurious drive-thru window of her playhouse Starbucks, I am tired and worn out. I am wrung out.

And so are you. We are lost on back roads, and yet again, we pass another Trail of Tears sign.

Not the same sign, but another marker. Another place where someone thought it important to stop and say: this happened here. Right here. Along these roads and ridges and stretches of Tennessee.

Then Google Maps instructed us to continue for half a mile.

My threshold dwindles into despair as you announce you need to pee. Thank goodness, me too.

Another Trail of Tears sign.

So we stop at "Country Girls Rest Stop," where an Indian woman (from India, not Trail of Tears) sells us mozzarella sticks and chicken sandwiches and a scratch-off ticket (we won nothing) after we have used some of the dirtiest bathrooms I've been in for at least two years. I left a bloody pair of panties in the trash can, and it's okay. It's part of the fun and the journey. I was just hangry. You too.

We eat and split a Reese's Cup and continue on. For the next five miles, you sporadically announce, "It's okay," and I follow with, "Yeah, we're okay."

And eventually, we are led to a main stretch of highway, which we will stay on for forty-three miles and cross the city limits into what we still call home, for now.

A miracle at last: I didn't cry once.

There, Too—

For all my life, and forevermore,

I will be a chickenshit motherfucker—

scared of winning and losing alike,

fearful of change and stagnation,

just scared to death until I die.

And if there's reincarnation

or some sort of afterlife,

I'd be a yellow-bellied coward

there, too.

Man vs. Bear

I know I’m a little late weighing in on this, but if I had to pick between a man and a bear, I’d actually pick the man.

Not because I trust him more than a bear, but because my husband is a huge animal lover and just couldn’t harm a bear.

But he has killed a man and would do it again for a lot less than someone fucking with me.

I think he’d even let me pick how that man dies. He says poison can be less suspicious, depending. Bullets are faster. But I don’t know—something about strangling or drowning someone to death for me just seems so romantic.

Then again, it might be more fun to make the guy dig his own grave first.

Nice to have options, though.

mosquitoes