Thursday

He got back from Hendersonville at six and I said it at about half nine, on the couch, with the television off, which is not how we do anything. I said: I think I need you to tell me the whole of something before I find it out. Once. On purpose, when you do not have to. I did not refine it. I had four paragraphs drafted in the car on Tuesday and I did not use any of them, and the only reason I managed that is that I had written down on Monday that I would ruin it by refining it, and I could see myself starting. He did not say anything for a while. Long enough that I had to sit in it, which was fair. Then he said: you mean the Feldman year. And I said yes. And he said, I have been waiting four years for you to ask me about it. Which was not what I expected. I had the whole thing mapped as me raising something painful and him being defensive or sorry, and what actually happened is that he has been standing on the other side of this the entire time thinking I had decided not to discuss it, and reading my not-discussing-it as a condition of being forgiven. Four years of both of us protecting the other one from a conversation we were both waiting to have. We talked until about one. Not all of it. Not even most of it. But he told me what the eleven months were actually like from the inside, which I had never asked and he had never offered, and some of it was genuinely hard to hear and none of it was a surprise, which I think is the thing that undid me. I have not cried in front of him in about two years. I did tonight.

That I was not waiting for him to come to me. I was refusing to go to him and calling it waiting. I need to sit with that one for a bit. It is nearly two in the morning.