Violeta Noir

I have thought very little about you.

That seems like a strange place to begin a story addressed to you, but it is the most honest one.

You existed at the edges of mine.

A name in a conversation. A voice from another room. A story he told me. Occasionally, a girl standing directly in front of me.

Then you were gone again.

My attention always returned to him.

According to your husband, you knew about me almost from the beginning. Days, perhaps weeks. He showed you my picture and told me you asked how you were supposed to compete with me.

I remember the words.

I don't remember thinking very much about them.

I wasn't competing with you.

I already had a husband.

I had children. A home. A family. A life that existed entirely outside of yours.

I wasn't looking for another husband.

I was starving for someone with a pulse.

My marriage had become quiet in a way that had very little to do with sound. It was functional. Predictable. Clinical, almost. We knew how to operate the machinery of a life together, but somewhere along the way I had stopped feeling very much inside of it.

Then I met your husband.

We couldn't stop talking.

About nothing. About everything. About galaxies and hidden worlds and conspiracies and things neither of us could prove. We talked until we should have been sleeping. We texted when we should have been working. There was always another thought waiting behind the last one.

I had forgotten what curiosity felt like inside my body.

Then there it was.

Desire followed quickly.

So did you.

Not into my thoughts very often, but into the circumstances.

You would tell him he would never see me again.

Then I would see him again.

You would fight with him about me.

Then he would come to me and tell me about the fight.

Sometimes you fought with me directly.

I never understood what you expected me to do with any of it.

He was your husband.

He was my lover.

Those were different positions.

I had no vows to enforce in your marriage. I had no promises to make him keep. I had no authority over what happened inside your home.

Neither did you have authority over mine.

For a long time, that seemed obvious to me.

Looking back, the image that comes to me is a girl with a bucket.

Scoop.

Pour.

Scoop.

Pour.

Trying to empty an ocean one argument at a time.

Another promise.

Another boundary.

Another declaration that this time he would never come back.

But the bucket was him.

That was the part I could never make sense of.

The same bucket you used to empty the ocean kept returning home full of seawater.

And I was never inside the bucket.

I existed somewhere beyond it.

I had my own home.

My own family.

My own work.

My own mind.

My own life.

My own tide.

I don't mean that I was more powerful than you.

I don't mean that I won.

There was nothing I wanted badly enough from your life to win.

I mean only that I existed independently of your marriage.

You could take your husband home.

You could empty the bucket.

You could turn it upside down.

You could tell him never to return to the water.

The ocean would still be there.

I would still wake up in my own bed.

Raise my children.

Go to work.

Go to school.

Love my husband.

Date other men when I was free to.

Laugh with my friends.

Live an entire life in which neither of you appeared for days, weeks, sometimes months.

And eventually I began to understand something about myself too.

I had spent a long time believing your husband was the ocean.

All that feeling.

All that chaos.

All that desire.

All those tears.

I thought he had brought something enormous into my life.

He hadn't.

He was the bucket.

I had mistaken what he carried for where it came from.

The desire was mine.

The curiosity was mine.

The hunger was mine.

The chaos, sometimes, was mine too.

The capacity to love until it hurt and still be grateful for the hurting was mine.

He hadn't brought me the ocean.

He had dipped himself into something that was already there.

I was the ocean.

I had always been the ocean.

He had simply walked far enough into me to remind me I had tides.

That is why this story does not end with me wishing I had never met him.

I loved this story.

I relished it.

Even when it hurt.

Sometimes especially when it hurt.

I had spent too many years living carefully enough that very little could reach me.

Then suddenly everything could.

Love.

Lust.

Anger.

Grief.

Jealousy.

Curiosity.

Absurdity.

Heartbreak.

Joy.

I ate every bit of it.

I would do it again.

I just don't need to keep doing it.

There was no lover without my husband.

I didn't understand that at first either.

My husband was the life I had built. The lover was the pulse I had gone looking for inside it.

As long as I had a husband, I didn't need my lover to be one.

He didn't need to be my home.

He didn't need to be my history.

He didn't need to build a life with me.

He didn't need to be everything.

He only needed to be my lover.

And for a long time, he was very good at that.

Once there was no husband, there was no reason for a lover.

The role disappeared.

He didn't move into the empty space.

I didn't want him there.

Without my husband, my lover had to stand on his own.

Not against the man I had married.

Not against the life we had built.

Against what I required from a man who wanted a meaningful place in my life.

Desire was no longer enough.

Love was no longer enough.

History was no longer enough.

Being a wonderful lover was no longer enough.

I was a whole woman.

I required a whole man.

And when the role disappeared, I discovered something else.

I hadn't lost the thing I had been searching for when all of this began.

I could still feel.

I could still laugh.

I could still desire.

I could still be devastated.

I could still be surprised.

I could still make terrible decisions and beautiful ones and occasionally discover they were the same decision viewed from different points in time.

I was alive.

I had always been alive.

I just hadn't known how hungry I was.

Maybe that's why I don't regret any of it.

I don't know what this life is.

I don't know what came before it or what comes after.

Sometimes I wonder whether this is all there is.

Sometimes I wonder whether we're dreaming.

Whether someday we'll wake and discover we were something else entirely.

Angels.

Servants of God.

Something opposite and just as impossible for me to imagine.

I don't know.

I only know that while I'm here, I get to feel.

All of it.

Even the things we call bad.

I get to be imperfect.

I get to make the wrong choice.

I get to love people I shouldn't.

I get to laugh when I'm supposed to cry and cry while some hidden part of me is still delighted to be alive enough to hurt.

I get to feel something so deeply that it breaks my heart.

What a privilege.

So this isn't an apology.

It isn't an accusation either.

I don't know enough about you to write either one honestly.

This is simply the view from where I stood.

You may remember an entirely different ocean.

That's yours to write.

This one is mine.

I was here.

I felt everything.

I relished every second.

And I intend to tell you exactly how I swam in it.