Violeta Noir

My future husband would never.

I don't remember the first time I thought it.

I remember how often I eventually did.

Your husband would be talking.

Explaining.

Arguing.

Defending.

Sometimes doing something so absurd that I could feel the sentence forming before he finished.

My future husband would never.

At first, it was funny.

Almost affectionate.

Because I loved your husband.

I loved him as he was.

I wasn't standing beside him secretly waiting for him to transform into somebody worthy of me.

I wasn't renovating him.

I wasn't raising him.

I had already raised enough people.

He was my lover.

And as a lover, there were things about him I adored.

The curiosity.

The darkness.

The absurdity.

The way we could disappear into conversation.

The way one thought became six.

The way we laughed.

The way he touched me.

The way I touched him.

The things we whispered when nobody else could hear us.

The shadows where we wore our crowns.

There were parts of him that fit beautifully into the position he occupied.

The problem came when he started imagining himself in another one.

Husband.

My husband.

Then the standards changed.

Because the qualities that make someone an intoxicating lover are not necessarily the qualities that make someone a good husband.

Chaos can be delicious when you can send it home.

It becomes considerably less charming when it has a key.

My future husband would never.

It became a private refrain.

He would talk in circles.

My future husband would never.

He would turn a complaint into a prosecution of the person making it.

My future husband would never.

He would tell me what somebody else had decided, what somebody else had done, what circumstances had forced, why now wasn't the right time.

And somewhere in the explanation, I would start looking for him.

Where are you in this story?

What did you choose?

What did you do?

What do you own?

I wasn't looking for perfection.

God knows I couldn't offer it.

I wanted accountability.

Conflict without psychological warfare.

An apology that didn't arrive carrying an accusation.

A decision that didn't require three people, two explanations, a crisis, and a revised timeline.

I wanted a man capable of saying:

I did this.

I was wrong.

Or:

I did this.

I meant to.

Or even:

I did this.

I know you don't like it.

I stand by it.

Something.

Anything with a spine.

Your husband could be extraordinarily honest about some things.

That was part of what attracted me to him.

He showed me pieces of himself most people would probably hide.

Dark pieces.

Ugly pieces.

Strange pieces.

I liked that.

I wasn't frightened by ugly truths.

I preferred them to pretty lies.

But disclosure and accountability are not the same thing.

Knowing your darkness exists does not mean you know what to do with it.

I was learning that about him.

I was learning it about myself too.

Therapy helped.

Distance helped.

Other relationships helped.

I started learning my triggers.

Learning the split second between feeling something and becoming it.

Learning that understanding why I reacted a certain way didn't absolve me of what I did next.

That lesson was inconvenient.

I kept it anyway.

So when your husband talked about marrying me, I couldn't evaluate him using only love anymore.

Love had already passed.

Desire had passed with honors.

Chemistry?

Please.

We had enough chemistry to restart an affair in a parking lot after ten months apart.

That test had been administered.

The question was no longer whether I wanted him.

The question was:

Would I build a life around the way this man behaves when life becomes difficult?

Increasingly, my answer was no.

There were things I could tolerate from a lover precisely because he was a lover.

If we fought, I could tell him to go home.

If I needed space, I could take it.

If I wanted somebody else, I was single.

My home remained mine.

My finances remained mine.

My future remained mine.

For months, I kept your husband as my dirty little secret.

Hidden.

Compartmentalized.

Separate from the life I had built.

He could occupy enormous spaces in me without occupying enormous spaces in my actual life.

My bed?

Yes.

My thoughts?

Constantly.

My desire?

Obviously.

My heart?

More than I intended.

My children?

No.

I didn't want him around them.

That should have told me everything.

My children weren't an experiment.

They weren't part of the shadows.

They weren't characters in whatever strange, beautiful, destructive thing your husband and I kept choosing with each other.

They were mine to protect.

I could decide how much chaos I was willing to tolerate in my own life.

I didn't get to make that decision for theirs.

And if I didn't want this man around my children, what exactly did I think I meant when I imagined him becoming my husband?

A husband doesn't exist only between sheets, under trees, in parking lots, or inside conversations nobody else can hear.

He exists at breakfast.

In the living room.

On ordinary Tuesdays.

During arguments.

During bad moods.

Around my children.

Inside their home.

And I didn't want your husband there.

Marriage would mean his conflict style lived in my house.

His decisions affected my money.

His consequences arrived at my address.

His inability to choose became something I had to compensate for.

And I knew myself.

If he refused to steer, eventually I would.

If he wouldn't make the decision, I would make it.

If he wouldn't solve the problem, I would solve it.

If he wouldn't carry his weight, I would carry it until I resented him for making me strong enough to do it.

I knew that woman.

I had already been her.

I didn't want to be her again.

Then there was the DARVO.

Conflict with your husband could become disorienting.

I could begin with something he had done and somehow end up defending myself.

My tone.

My reaction.

My history.

My flaws.

Something I had done three arguments ago.

Suddenly the original issue was sitting abandoned somewhere in the corner while we prosecuted an entirely different case.

Sometimes I participated.

Sometimes I escalated.

Sometimes I said things designed to cut.

I am not going to pretend I stood there communicating like a therapist with a clipboard.

I could be vicious.

I knew exactly where his soft places were.

He knew mine.

Two people who know exactly where the other bleeds have choices to make during conflict.

Heal it.

Protect it.

Or put a finger in the wound.

We had both demonstrated that we were capable of the third.

I could survive that with a lover.

I wasn't going to build a marriage inside it.

Still, I thought I had hope.

I thought that was what the year meant.

Leave.

Be single.

Grow.

Come back.

Then maybe we could discover whether all those somedays had somewhere real to go.

But while I was telling myself that, I was doing something else.

I was slowly pushing him out of my life.

Not dramatically.

Inches.

Less access.

Less accommodation.

Another part of my life quietly reclaimed.

Then he asked me for a week.

Space.

Fine.

I gave it to him.

Completely.

I didn't call.

I didn't check on him.

I didn't invent little reasons to remind him I was still there.

He asked me for a week.

So I gave him a week.

And something happened I wasn't expecting.

I enjoyed it.

More than I thought I would.

I enjoyed my life without him in it.

I told him.

When he came back, he told me he'd had a chance to stand in the grass.

Just stand there.

And he hadn't had to deal with my questions.

Fair enough.

Except he was also upset that I hadn't checked on him.

I laughed.

He asked me for the week.

Now he was upset because I had actually given it to him.

What was I supposed to do?

Respect the request incorrectly?

Give him space but interrupt it periodically so he could be certain I was still thinking about him?

No.

You ask me for a week, you get a week.

And the questions?

This was the same man whose questions I had told him felt like an inquisition.

Now he was telling me how nice it had been not dealing with mine.

I acted hurt.

I wasn't.

Inside, I laughed again.

That part was theater.

Stand in the grass, baby.

Be free.

What made me livid wasn't that he hadn't enjoyed my questions.

It was the negativity he brought back with him.

I had just spent a week without it.

And now I knew what my life felt like without that weight.

It felt good.

Then he came back into my house.

Into my room.

Into my bed.

A place where wanting him had always been the easiest thing in the world.

Except this time,

I didn't.

That had never happened before.

Your husband was in my bed and I didn't want him.

I noticed.

Of course I noticed.

This was the man whose body had been almost embarrassingly easy for mine to answer.

Ten months apart hadn't killed it.

Other men hadn't killed it.

Anger hadn't killed it.

Time hadn't killed it.

And now he was lying beside me and I simply didn't want him.

The next day, I had him.

I knew we were coming to a close.

I could feel it.

Your husband was moving toward self-destruction again.

Same patterns.

Same circling.

Like a broken record.

I knew the song.

So I had him.

Maybe some part of me expected the familiar magic to make an appearance.

It didn't.

It was mediocre at best.

After everything our bodies had been to each other,

after all those years of knowing exactly where to touch,

where to kiss,

what to whisper,

somehow this felt like driving a car with flat tires.

Technically, we were moving.

But Jesus Christ, why?

And afterward, I didn't feel nostalgic.

I didn't feel reassured.

I didn't think,

There we are.

I thought,

Oh.

Even this.

Even the thing that had always worked when nothing else did.

Even the language our bodies had spoken long after our minds stopped agreeing.

This too had become work.

And that solidified everything.

I was done.

Not I will never desire this man again.

I knew better than to make promises about chemistry that had resurrected itself before.

I was done trying to make desire mean something about my future.

Then came that morning.

I was furious.

I looked at your husband and told him I had outgrown him.

I told him he wasn't good enough for me.

And in the middle of that anger, I told him it was taking everything in me not to grab the pen from my nightstand and stab him to death with it.

There was no poetry in that sentence.

No crown.

No performance.

Just rage.

And underneath it, something I hadn't been willing to name.

He was leaving.

Somehow, after all of that, there were two hugs.

He hugged me once.

Then again.

I asked him if he was running away.

He said he wasn't.

Maybe he wasn't.

But I was letting go.

He walked away.

And as he left, I felt him look back at me.

I didn't look back.

Not deliberately.

Not because I wanted him to notice I wasn't watching.

There was no performance in it.

I was watching the birds in the trees.

That's where my attention was.

The birds.

The branches.

Whatever was happening above me while your husband walked away.

Maybe there was a time when I would have watched until he disappeared.

Searched his face for some final clue.

Is he coming back?

Does he love me?

What happens now?

But that morning, I felt him look back and kept watching the birds.

It was the day before your baby shower.

The next day,

before your baby shower or during it,

I don't know,

he wished me a wonderful day.

And I created more distance.

I told him I didn't want the check-ins anymore.

If he wanted to see me, he could ask me out.

I would decide whether I was available.

No standing appointment in my life.

No automatic access.

And I didn't want him back in my house.

I still don't.

Right now, I don't know if I ever want to see him again.

He hasn't reached out.

Neither have I.

I think that's for the best.

And somewhere in all that distance, I finally understood what I had been getting wrong.

I thought I had hope.

I didn't.

I had desire.

I had mistaken the intensity of wanting him for evidence that I still wanted somewhere to go with him.

Those were not the same thing.

Hope points forward.

Mine didn't.

Whenever I tried to point us toward tomorrow, I had to start changing the man.

My future husband would take accountability.

My future husband would resolve conflict differently.

My future husband would make decisions.

My future husband would be someone I wanted around my children.

My future husband would be someone I wanted inside my home.

I had repeated the refrain so many times that I stopped hearing the answer inside it.

Your husband would.

Because he was himself.

The same man I loved.

The same man I desired.

And that was when I understood something else.

For years, there had been so much conversation about choice.

Would he choose you?

Would he choose me?

Would he leave?

Would he stay?

Which life did he want?

And I had spent remarkably little time worrying about the answer.

I thought that was because I didn't need to be chosen.

That was true.

But it wasn't the whole truth.

I never needed your husband to choose me because I had never chosen him.

Not for the position he kept imagining.

I chose him every time I opened the door.

Every time I kissed him.

Every time I ran toward him.

Every time I let him back between my sheets.

I chose the lover.

Again and again.

But the man who would build my future?

I kept reserving judgment.

That's what the year had always protected.

My right to choose.

He could leave you.

He could get his own place.

He could spend a year single.

He could come back afterward and tell me he still loved me.

And I would still get to choose.

Once, I might have.

There was a version of our future I genuinely considered.

I had considered having his child.

I had imagined the family.

I had entertained someday.

But he waited.

And I watched.

Children disappeared first.

Then marriage.

Desire didn't.

That was what confused me.

I thought because I could still want him that badly, somewhere inside me I must still believe in us.

I didn't.

I believed in the desire.

I believed in the chemistry.

I believed in the love.

I believed in the pull.

I believed in the lover.

I no longer believed in the husband.

I could love him and not choose him.

I could desire him and not build around him.

I could feel the pull and walk in another direction.

A pull is not a direction.

Desire is not a decision.

Love is not a future.

And maybe my behavior understood that before I did.

I kept him secret.

I kept him away from my children.

I slowly reduced his place in my life.

I discovered I enjoyed my life without him.

Then, for the first time, he was in my bed and I didn't want him.

The answer had been arriving for months.

I just hadn't named it.

When I finally did, I expected heartbreak.

Normally, this is where I would cry.

I would feel the loss before he had even completely disappeared.

I would ache.

I would mourn.

I would miss him while I was still angry with him.

But I don't.

I don't feel any of those things.

I kept expecting to find the heartbreak I knew so well.

It wasn't there.

There was no hole where your husband used to be.

There was space.

So much space.

I feel free.

Like I'm somewhere up there with those birds.

Soaring.

Light.

Untethered.

Like shackles have fallen away.

And maybe that's the final irony.

They were never mine to wear.

Your marriage was never mine to carry.

His choices were never mine to carry.

His consequences were never mine to carry.

His self-destruction was never mine to stop.

For years, I stood close enough to all of it that sometimes I forgot the weight didn't belong to me.

Now I've put it down.

And there isn't heartbreak underneath it.

There is sky.

I chose my lover.

Repeatedly.

Enthusiastically.

Sometimes foolishly.

Sometimes selfishly.

Sometimes knowing exactly what I was doing.

But when it came to my children,

my home,

another child,

my peace,

my future,

my husband,

I kept choosing around him.

Maybe he'll appear in these Archives again.

Maybe he won't.

I don't know.

This isn't fiction.

I don't get to know the ending before I live it.

But for once,

I don't need to.

He walked away.

He looked back.

I looked up.

And there were birds in the trees.

For once,

I wasn't watching someone leave.

I was noticing that I could fly.