By the time Lou got home from the office that night, I had pretty much cried myself out of emotions.
It was obvious that I’d spent the day in tears — my eyes looked like two fleshy footballs they were swollen. Lou seemed spent to me, too, and when he joined me at the dining room table, he offered up a second apology for the previous nights’ road rage event.
I could see how sad he was about how his reaction the night before made me feel. Lou used his words beautifully that night to express to me how horrible he was feeling about everything, but he plainly explained how my behavior in the car is the one thing he simply couldn’t handle. My fears in the car set him off like nothing else in the world, and he just couldn’t take it anymore.
I accepted Lou’s apology, and offered one of my own.
I remember reassuring Lou that I understood how I made him feel in the car — I just couldn’t figure out how to contain my constant and irrational fears anymore either. By this point in time, the only way I could imagine us working through everything between us was by giving ourselves a break from each other. My emotions were wrung dry, so it was easier than I expected it to be to tell Lou that Vanessa had offered to take me to England with her.
Lou seemed to lighten up instantly when I unfolded the early details of my trip to England with Vanessa, and I remember that he said he believed it was a great idea. He thought time apart would be good for him, too. He was very frustrated with me – and my writing with Sam – and, he was harboring a lot of emotions that he, too, wasn’t sure how to unpack.
Considering how dramatic and unpredictable things had been between us since before Christmas, making the decision to go away for a little bit seemed anticlimactic in every way. I remember a very vivid layer of calm seemed to settle between Lou and me that night, and as I watched TV in my makeshift crib, I felt certain that this decision was not me running away from my problems.
