Violeta Noir

I knew you long before I knew you.

Or rather,

I knew the version of you your husband gave me.

There is a difference.

I didn't understand how important that difference was then.

In the beginning,

I simply listened.

Your husband talked.

A lot.

About himself.

About his childhood.

His family.

His friends.

His mistakes.

His grief.

His marriage.

You.

Especially when he needed me to understand why his life looked different from the life he said he wanted.

He told me he was unhappy.

He told me he didn't want to be married.

He told me he had been tricked into marrying you.

He told me you were basically family before you became his wife.

He told me you had been there when he was wounded.

That you listened.

That you cared for him.

That you accepted him when he wasn't doing well.

I understood why he loved you.

That part never confused me.

He had a way of falling in love with women who made wounded places feel safe.

I would notice that pattern later.

At the time,

I was just collecting information.

Then came the complaints.

The house.

Your clothes.

Your habits.

Your friends.

Your body.

The way you kissed.

The way you moved through the world.

Things that irritated him.

Things that embarrassed him.

Things he believed you should do differently.

Private things.

Things I would never have known if your husband hadn't decided I should.

I didn't ask for most of them.

But I listened.

And because he was telling me about his life,

I initially mistook access for accuracy.

That was my mistake.

Knowing intimate details about a person does not mean you know them.

Sometimes it only means someone who knows them has been talking.

I knew what your husband said about you.

I did not know you.

Still,

his stories accumulated.

Piece by piece,

he built a girl for me.

She was insecure.

She was difficult.

She didn't understand him.

She needed him.

She frustrated him.

She embarrassed him.

She loved him.

She stayed.

That last part interested me.

Because he would ask me why.

Why does she stay?

He asked it as though the answer belonged entirely to you.

I would look at him and wonder why he was asking me.

You were his wife.

He was your husband.

If he was as unhappy as he said,

if the marriage was something he never wanted,

if he had been tricked into entering it,

then there was another question sitting directly beside his.

Why do you?

He usually had an answer.

There was always an answer.

History.

Family.

Responsibility.

Timing.

Circumstance.

Someone else's feelings.

Someone else's needs.

Something that had happened to him.

Something that needed to happen first.

I listened.

Then I watched.

That became a habit with him.

I would take the explanation and place it beside the action.

Not angrily.

Not even suspiciously at first.

Just side by side.

You don't want to be married.

You are married.

You were tricked into marrying her.

You remain her husband.

You don't understand why she stays.

You stay.

You are unhappy.

You go home.

I wasn't trying to convict him.

I was trying to understand him.

He didn't always appreciate the distinction.

Sometimes I would repeat his own words back to him without the explanation wrapped around them.

Matter of fact.

He would tell me I was judging him.

I wasn't.

At least,

not yet.

I was noticing.

There is a difference.

I have always been interested in contradictions.

People tell you an extraordinary amount about themselves in the space between what they say and what they do.

Your husband had a lot of space.

I found him fascinating.

Maybe that was part of the attraction.

He was never boring.

Even when I disagreed with him,

there was something to examine.

Something to question.

Something to turn around in my hand and look at from another side.

And because I wasn't trying to make him my husband,

I didn't need his answers to become prettier.

I could leave the contradictions where they were.

I could tell him,

That doesn't make sense.

I could tell him,

You chose that.

I could tell him,

You keep saying this happened to you, but you are still participating in it.

Sometimes he would explain again.

Sometimes he would become angry.

Sometimes he would become wounded.

Sometimes the villain would appear.

He would tell me how terrible he was.

How everything was his fault.

How maybe he was simply a bad person.

For a moment,

the victim disappeared.

But I began to notice something.

The villain rarely stayed long.

Once the person he had hurt stopped hurting loudly enough,

once he had apologized,

once he had suffered sufficiently for having caused the suffering,

the story shifted again.

He became wounded.

Misunderstood.

Overwhelmed.

Trying his best.

The victim returned.

I found that fascinating too.

I told him.

Of course I told him.

I told him that he had a way of making the women he loved into mothers.

He came to them wounded.

They softened.

They cared for him.

They helped bring him back to health.

And somewhere inside that tenderness,

he fell in love.

Then eventually,

he resented the dynamic.

He wanted freedom from the very kind of care that had once made him feel safe.

I told him I wouldn't do it.

I could love him.

I could be soft with him.

I could hold him.

I could listen.

I could care.

But I would not raise him.

I already had children.

He was not one of them.

That distinction mattered to me.

Maybe because I already knew what happened when love became labor.

Maybe because your husband had told me exactly what he wanted.

He didn't want to be needed.

I remembered that.

I remember most things people tell me when they explain how they want to be loved.

So I didn't need him.

That would become a problem later.

But not yet.

For now,

I was still listening.

And the more he talked,

the stranger the story became.

Not just the marriage.

The family around it.

Who had known whom.

Who had raised whom.

Who had slept with whom.

Who married whom.

Who became related to whom afterward.

Friends who became family.

Family created through marriages that folded old relationships back into themselves.

His father.

Women.

Stepsisters.

Old lovers.

New spouses.

Every new story required another explanation.

Another connection.

Another,

Wait.

Who is that person again?

I tried to follow.

I really did.

Eventually,

I realized I had been picturing a family tree.

That was the problem.

Trees branch outward.

This didn't.

This kept circling back.

People becoming family after occupying entirely different positions.

Old sexual relationships intersecting with new marriages.

Children becoming siblings through adults who had already crossed other lines.

Every explanation seemed to require another explanation.

I remember thinking there had to be a diagram somewhere that would make this less strange.

There wasn't.

At least,

not one I could draw.

And somewhere in all those stories,

I began to understand that the girl your husband had constructed for me did not exist by herself.

Neither did he.

There was history underneath both of you.

History beside you.

History sleeping in adjacent rooms.

History marrying into history.

History repeating itself while everyone involved insisted this particular version was different.

I still didn't know you.

I want to be clear about that.

I knew his grievances.

His explanations.

His memories.

His interpretation of your marriage.

His interpretation of you.

That isn't the same thing as knowing a person.

If I had understood that distinction more fully then,

perhaps I would have listened differently.

Probably not.

I was having too much fun.

But now,

looking backward,

I can separate the girl from the story told about her.

I don't know the girl.

I know the story.

And based on the story your husband gave me,

eventually I stopped trying to picture a family tree.

I pictured a wreath.

A wreath of incest.