The World Forgetting, by the World Forgot

I’ve had to change all my PIN numbers for everything: bank cards, cell phone messages, house phone messages etc.  They all used to be the dates of significant events in the love story of my husband and me.  To check my cell phone messages, I’d enter the month and day when he first tested the waters about becoming more than the friends we’d been for the previous seven or eight years.  “Do you ever wonder...?” was how he broached the topic.  To use the bank machine, I’d enter the month and day on which he first told me he loved me.  “I ll-ooo-vvve you” was how he said it with tears in his eyes and wonder in his voice stretching out the verb so it came out almost like a question.

I waited 7 months before changing those PINs, and then when my certainty about a reconciliation began to wane, I decided it was time to choose numbers that didn’t rip my heart out every time I keyed them in.

There must be equivalent things for him.  Doesn’t he once in a while glance over at my side of the double closet we shared and remember when we sat together on the floor in our half built bedroom with the closet designer guy who sneezed a very wet sneeze into his hand and then tried to shake ours?  Doesn’t he open the armoire in the basement from time to time and stumble on the air mattress we blew up for making love in front of the fireplace on Valentine’s Day 2007. Doesn’t he glance at his mother’s curtains that I hemmed and hung in the dining room, and feel thankful that he had a wife who could sew? Didn’t he miss me this past September when he and his friends did their annual day of tomato sauce jarring and I wasn’t there to help?  How is he able to just cut my face out of every photo in his head?  It’s like the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I’ve been erased.  I never existed.

It’s amazing to me that even as I am remembering the heartache and misery of one year ago right now, I can still get a wave of tenderness when an email shows up in my inbox from the proprietors of the Bed and Breakfast we stayed at in Hawaii in 2009, or I see the Aztec brick shade painted on the wall of a restaurant and remember that we picked that out for his ski chalet.  I get a flipflop in my chest when I think of his scratchy face when he didn’t shave and his sleepy voice when he first awoke in the  morning and the oversized blue bath robe he wrapped himself in while reading the Star every morning.

Lord, I’d like the ability to do those kinds of emotional cut-offs, but I am not wired that way.

Love’s a bitch.