Violeta Noir

Let me try to draw it for you.

I tried to draw it for myself once.

Not literally.

Although, looking back,

paper might have helped.

Your husband told me you were basically family before you became his wife.

That sentence seemed simple enough.

It wasn't.

The more he explained,

the more branches appeared.

Then the branches started touching.

According to your husband,

his father had carried on an affair with your aunt.

Your mother's sister.

For ten years.

Eventually,

his father left his mother.

And then the families folded together.

Children were raised together.

Girls grew up like sisters.

People who had once been connected through an affair became connected through family.

And eventually,

your husband married you.

I tried to follow the branches.

His father's mistress was your mother's sister.

Your aunt.

The children grew up together.

Then the next generation married back into the same family.

That was when I realized I had been drawing it wrong.

I kept trying to make a family tree.

Trees branch outward.

This kept circling back.

Your husband told me about his stepsisters.

He wondered why they always seemed creeped out by him.

I remember thinking the answer seemed considerably more obvious from where I was standing.

He didn't seem to see it.

Or perhaps he saw it and didn't interpret it the way I did.

I can't know.

I wasn't there.

I didn't grow up inside those relationships.

I knew only what he told me.

Maybe growing up inside an arrangement makes it feel less peculiar.

I was hearing the story from outside.

And from outside,

I kept returning to the same word.

Incestuous.

Not necessarily in the biological sense.

In the architecture.

His father's lover became part of the family.

Children were raised together like sisters.

Then his son married back into that family.

The titles changed.

The people remained.

I called it incest.

By marriage.

Maybe that wasn't the clinical term.

It was mine.

Because every time I tried to draw a straight line,

someone married back into it.

A family tree should branch.

This one seemed determined to close the circle.

A wreath.

A wreath of incest.

The part I couldn't stop thinking about was his mother.

Her husband had carried on an affair for ten years before eventually leaving her.

And now,

according to the history her son had given me,

the families had folded together so completely that the next generation had married back into them.

Every time his mother looked at you,

I wondered what she saw.

And every time she looks at her grandson,

I wonder what she will see.

Whether somewhere behind his face

she will remember the woman

her husband chose over her.

Maybe she won't think about it at all.

I can't know.

I never asked her.

I thought about it.

And the only word that came to me was

karma.

Not punishment.

Not some cosmic judge handing out sentences.

Something quieter.

A pattern returning to the place where it began.

A family living long enough to watch old choices reappear wearing new faces.

Perhaps that interpretation belongs only to me.

It probably does.

But I knew one thing with certainty.

I did not want to become part of it.

That was why every time your husband talked about leaving you,

I gave him the same condition.

A year.

Not a year with me.

A year without me.

Leave your marriage because you want to leave your marriage.

Get your own home.

Build your own life.

Learn how to be alone.

Be a father.

Be a man who wakes up in the morning and makes decisions without needing a woman waiting at either end of them.

And then,

after a year,

if you still want me,

come find me.

If I still want you,

maybe we'll talk.

He never seemed to understand why I insisted on that year.

I did.

I did not trust him to make good decisions.

Look at the decision standing directly in front of me.

He had told me he didn't want his marriage.

He told me he had been tricked into it.

He told me he was unhappy.

And yet he remained.

Then he wanted a baby.

Then you became pregnant.

Then he was going to leave after the baby.

December.

January.

There was always another point on the horizon where he would finally become the man making his own decisions.

I refused to be waiting at that point.

I would not be his consolation prize.

I would not let him walk directly out of one woman's house and into mine and call the movement growth.

That wasn't transformation.

That was relocation.

And I had seen enough of the family story he gave me to know what happened when people changed partners without changing themselves.

The names changed.

The houses changed.

The titles changed.

The pattern survived.

His father had made choices.

His son was making choices.

And from where I stood,

your husband had chosen a wife who seemed eerily positioned inside the same architecture he had inherited.

A replica,

I sometimes thought,

of his father's mistress.

Not the same woman.

Not necessarily the same personality.

The same position in the story.

And perhaps I was wrong.

This was his history as he told it to me,

filtered through my interpretation of people I did not truly know.

But that interpretation was enough to determine what I would not do.

I would not become the next repetition.

I would not become the woman he left another woman for.

I would not become the soft place he landed so quickly that he never had to discover whether he could stand alone.

I would not let him point at me afterward and say,

I left for you.

No.

If he ever left,

he needed to leave for himself.

And if there was nothing waiting for him afterward but an empty apartment,

shared custody,

bills,

silence,

and his own reflection,

he needed to be able to live with the decision anyway.

That was the test.

Not whether he loved me.

I knew he loved me.

Not whether I loved him.

I did.

The question was whether he could make a life-changing decision without placing responsibility for that decision in somebody else's hands.

I wouldn't hold it.

Not even for love.

Especially not for love.

Then you became pregnant.

And somehow,

while you carried his actual child,

your husband began mourning imaginary ones with me.

He told me he wanted me to be his wife.

He mourned the family we could have had.

The babies I would have given him.

And I listened while taking very real measures to make certain there would never be one.

I didn't want his baby.

I didn't want to become another branch.

I certainly didn't want to become another loop.

Then came the name.

Your husband wanted to give your son the same name as my dead best friend.

He told me it was sentimental to him

because it was sentimental to us.

Us.

I looked at him with disgust.

That's creepy.

I told him so.

Because after everything he had told me about that family,

the last thing I wanted was something sacred from my own life woven into it.

My dead best friend belonged to my history.

My grief.

My memories.

A life that existed before your husband ever appeared in a chat room showing strangers his dick.

That name was not a souvenir from our affair.

It was not a secret monument to us.

And it was not something I wanted carried into the identity of your son.

That little boy already had enough history waiting for him.

He didn't need mine.

Whatever existed between your husband and me,

whatever he imagined we might someday become,

whatever imaginary family he mourned beside me,

did not belong in the name of your actual child.

Have your child.

Name your child.

Love your child.

Build whatever family the two of you are going to build.

But leave my dead out of it.

There were already enough ghosts in that house.

I wasn't donating mine.

Maybe that's what I understood about the wreath before I understood anything else.

I could sleep with your husband.

I could love him.

I could spend hours beneath trees with him.

I could let him occupy enormous emotional spaces inside me.

And still say,

This ends here.

Because I never wanted your position.

And I never wanted to inherit his father's story.

If your husband ever came to me as a free man,

I wanted him to arrive after having learned how to be one.

Alone.

No wife.

No lover.

No woman waiting to reward him for finally making a decision.

One year.

Then we could talk.

Until then,

I would remain outside the wreath.

I had seen enough circles.

I wanted to know whether your husband could finally draw a straight line.