It’s confusing, and anxiety-breeding, and I don’t know how people handle it all. It seems like only a week ago and I was complaining about how frustrating it was to have to wait nearly four months before the next legal hurdle, not knowing what was happening. Now, we’re just under a month, and we’re no closer to knowing anything.
Every day I notice the cloud lifts a little and I become more present in my day to day life. The world keeps turning and as much as I’d like to be back in November it’s somewhere I cannot return. Sadly time travel hasn’t been invented yet.
And, as a friend on another social media site said, the cloud lifts a little. Just a bit, here and there. There’s honesty and transparency, on both our parts. But mostly, there’s a lot of fear and uncertainty. Four months ago, it was easy not to think of what’s going to happen after May 30th. Now though, the clouds lift and the things we’ve let lurk in the shadows are now the same things we’re forced to stare in the face.
It’s those things that make me wish I could go back to The Before. Before November of last year, before the summer of 2016, before.
There’s the future, full of questions. What’s going to happen to him? Jail or not, he’s going to be a changed man. Fuck, he’s already been changed. There’s an anxiety that wasn’t there, and a sadness. I see a lot of my own struggles in him now, analyzing every conversation and action for hidden meaning. He goes to therapy a couple of times a month. As much as I’d like to know what they talk about sometimes, to know what might be said about what happened between us or to him, the why’s of everything, I don’t ask, and he doesn’t offer anything.
What will happen to us? Right now, we’re maintaining the status quo. I try to put the winter out of mind and focus on the future and, most importantly, myself. I can’t change what’s going to happen in the future, not can I change him or his actions of the past, present, and future. I can only change how I react to what’s the universe throws my way.
Right now, he’s my husband. I don’t have any other title for him. A day after I bailed him out, when talking about what was going to happen, he realized he was assuming I’d still be with him. He stopped and asked what my plan was, did I even want him in my future. I was being honest when I told him then that I didn’t know, and I wasn’t making any promises. “Work on yourself, then – and only then – will we discuss working on ‘us’.”
One of the first things he looked for when he was back in the house was his wedding band. As was my habit, I’d taken my own off the night before his arrest, and it sat in the same place on the coffee table until the morning after his return. He asked if I would ever wear it again, and I was honest again. I’m not comfortable wearing a wedding ring, a symbol of a union he disrespected in the most awful ways. Later, I noticed he was wearing his ring on his left hand, and mine on his right. “Until you’re ever ready to wear it again, I’ll wear it for both of us.”
The big issue looming is the worst case scenario – what happens if there is time to be served. I feel like I can’t make plans. We got a free tree for our yard, and I choose the earliest pickup date because we don’t know what’s happening and I didn’t want to plant it and only have a short time to put it on the ground if I’m forced to leave the house. I see things I want or need, but I worry about money, or what’s going to happen six months down the line. Do I buy more scrubs for work if I don’t know if that job will be there in The After? What happens to him, to me, to us? Where do we go from there? There’s no road map for this sort of thing.
