talonkarrde | Second Chance (One Touch)

If a person who indulges in gluttony is a glutton, and a person who commits a felony is a felon, then God is an iron.

It would be the touch of my fingers on her cheek, a comforting gesture, that gives me the knowledge that everything I’ve believed these past twenty years is predicated on a lie. It would be the fact that she cared for me and that she wanted me to be okay that would reveal the fundamental falsehood of our marriage.

You see, after I passed out, when I came to in her hands, I reached up to stroke her cheek, to reassure her that I was alright. And it was then, then, when the lightning bolt struck, when I learned everything there was to know about her, more intimately than any husband had ever known his wife. It was then when I got what all the lovers out there wish for, to coexist in one mind.

And it was then that I learned that she didn’t love me.

That brilliant instant that my fingers traced the jawline that I had so lovingly kissed so many times before, her mind was opened to me; her dreams, her wishes, her deepest desires. I saw through her eyes, thought with her thoughts, and felt her feelings. I saw the old, refinished Victorian house that she wanted to live in and the lovely, upstanding woman she wanted our daughter to grow up to be and the artist she wanted to be in old age, and none of it involved me. Or in the few times it did, but I was never an essential part of her dreams and wishes, just an afterthought.

I was only in her present because I had been in her past; I was a habit. A good habit, she thought, but not...not the love of her life. Or perhaps, even, a love at all, just an affectionate fondness.

How does one deal with that? The idea that my wife of twenty years, the mother of our children, the girl that I had spent years pursuing and then decades living with, didn’t love me the way I loved her — didn’t, in fact, love me at all? Oh, she was fond of me, of course, she cared, but it is in such a way that one says, ‘oh, honey, you’re cooking isn’t terrible’.

The scientist in me desperately tried to rationalize thoughts that would be palatable to the emotional side. She stayed with you for this long because she thinks you’re a good father, it said, along with some people simply don’t need someone else like that, it’s not your fault. It’s just a difference in degree, it continued, but the feeling is still there.

But I was never good at lying to myself, or to anyone else. It was in our vows, the ones that we had written for each other, where we had pledged to be each others’. Irony, again. She was the one who had talked about true love and soul mates and being the only person; I’d simply said to protect and cherish, in sickness and in health. And here, this, incontrovertible proof of the reversal.

But there was still Rachel, our teenage daughter. There was still the house and the car and the lives that we shared, the memories that stretched back thirty years. All of those Memorial Day barbecues and New Years spent together, all of the bickering and the shopping and the decisions made together, I couldn’t just leave it all. Most of all, I couldn’t leave Rachel with the idea that her parents never loved each other, because it wasn’t true.

So I did nothing, you see, and I hid the fact that I knew, that it killed me, because there are things that are more important than love. I ate the fact that I knew, kissed her like I always had and slowly, bit by bit, I reconciled myself with the truth, and the world didn’t fall down upon itself. Not even my world; I soldiered on. I tried not to touch her though; it simply hurt too much.

A scientist never falsifies data to support his own hypothesis; it was the most bitter pill I had ever taken.

And then, one day, I came home to flowers, to a candlelit dinner that reminded me of our first anniversary, and she was sitting quietly, in a beautiful dress. I asked her what the occasion was; it had been ages since we celebrated anything, and she simply said, our anniversary.

She rose from the seat and reached out and said, come here, and what could I do but go to her? And she watched as my fingers slowly dropped onto hers, and I saw, again, what she did, and I felt what she felt, and I knew.

She had seen my mind when I had seen hers. And she had learned to love me, as I never stopped loving her.