A few days after I got home, Lou decided to travel to LA to work with the group he was consulting.
I stayed behind in Salt Lake City.
We hadn’t even been in our (dumpy-ass) condo for four months yet, and so we had to be smart about how we were going to step away from our obligations to the half-life we had started to create in Utah. We had to make clean breaks, and sometimes that takes time, too. And, we both understood that Lou’s solo trip was only partly for him; it was also for me. I needed space, time, and solitude to find myself in my daily grind — even if that meant that I had to stay in Utah on my own for a little bit longer.
But I remember the morning Lou left for LA as if it happened to me yesterday. I had this enormous bottleneck of emotions in my throat. I was afraid for Lou to leave me, but I was overwhelmed by the idea of him staying. I felt manic and (honestly) deranged, and I didn’t want to cause Lou any more pain or confusion. So I knew he had to go to LA on his own.
I still felt like my irrational side was in charge, and I was so fearful I’d lose my way again if I didn’t keep unwinding my thoughts and ideas the way I did when I was in England. I needed more time without my husband so I didn’t feel responsible for Lou’s feelings when I was stripping myself down to my final (and ugliest) layers. I needed time by myself to honestly write my way out of this mess I had created.
It was a lot to ask of Lou to give me this kind of space — especially because I was asking him to leave me alone in Salt Lake City. Lou confessed to me that he had a lot of unresolved issues and fears around Sam; and, quite frankly, so did I. I had made things so confusing for Lou when it came to Sam, and, I couldn’t ignore or excuse the very real breaches of trust that I had created inside of our marriage.
And even though I think Lou tried to understand that my attachment to Sam was wrapped up in my writing, I sincerely understood how difficult it was for Lou to separate my two very complicated realities in his mind. It was difficult for me to keep it all sorted, too, but it was obviously much worse for Lou.
But I still remember saying that even though I knew I didn’t deserve it, I needed Lou to trust me.
Shockingly, Lou said that he already did. (Wow…)
So I decided that I needed to trust me, too. I had to directly face the ending of that connection in my life because it was the last and most scary part of my unraveling. I was completely certain that Sam wasn’t a threat to my marriage, but I was still having trouble disconnecting Sam from Eloise — and I feared that my attachment to Eloise still had the potential to destroy Lou and me forever.
Eloise was at the center of so much confusion in my thoughts, and that was the part of my process that often made me feel insane. Even writing about how complicated my fiction was — and maybe still is to a certain degree — makes me sound like I’m completely mental! But I know I’m not. That’s probably because I understand things better now than I did back then. I know that I’m a storyteller… And this is just who I am — even though this fact might make me a very complicated person to be married to.
Anyway…
I wrote pages and pages of journal entries while I was in England about how my mind had always twisted up my hopes for my career and my marriage into an impossibly tight knot that I couldn’t figure out how to undo. That knot had been strangling the flow of my creativity and my joy for a very long time. And even though I knew that wasn’t good, I always believed that “when the time was right,” I could simply loosen the knot enough so my passion for writing could flow, and Lou and I would still be OK.
But when Sam came along, and I started to pick at the knot to give myself some slack to create, I discovered that Lou and I are not made of one string, but rather, we’re made of two very different strings that were perfectly bound together — and if I untied myself from my husband to pursue my career, I was certain I might lose Lou forever.
So there had to be a way for me to understand my life differently… Or, better. I had to stop seeing my marriage as a knot, or two strings that could be un-tethered by my passion and purpose in life. I had to see “us” differently… I didn’t know the new metaphor for my life or my marriage yet but surrendering the old one felt like a start.
Lou and I had to reinvent how we were connected to each other so that our marriage bond would be strong and unbreakable, but also in such a way that we were both able to be the people we were meant to be as individuals. The codependent attachment that we had to each other after so many years of living in a state of constant survival may have kept us together, but it wasn’t helping either of us thrive…
On the morning that Lou left, we hugged each other for a long goodbye in the chilly parking garage under our building. It was all I could do not to burst into tears. When I got back into our gloomy condo, I sat on the miserably cold floor in Lou’s walk-in closet, and I cried my heart out.
Looking at Lou’s beautifully made dress shirts all perfectly ironed and organized by color made me feel connected to him in the only way I could manage that day. I needed the stiff emptiness of his shirts, and the light feeling of Lou’s being to hover around me so I could think, pray, and grieve.
