The wind pulls around the house today, making the windows rattle and pulling stop signs this way and that. Bean never got sick (he’s teething instead), but I’m on the cusp of something. A sore throat and too much tiredness filling the spaces in my soul with easy sadness. Outside light dapples the pine tree by my window. The sky is torn. Gray, with gold tufts as though it’s stuffing were coming out.
DH and I fought in the whispered dark of our bedroom last night, over the accumulated stress of renovating and of taking things for granted between us because of it. I feel terror when I see us falling into patterns like this. When whole days go by and all we do is talk about the house, and pass the baby back and forth.
But rather than letting silence fill the space between us, push at each other. We argue, and the friction shows that there is still a fiery pulse below the surface, of love and passion. In the midst of the heat we discover all over again that there is nothing here that we want to lose. What we have, we want. Our love, even when it is painted a dark purple with resentment, is sweeter than any separate peace.
As long as we are talk, throwing our words about like the silent knives in a martial arts flick, we are not stuck. More than fire, I fear stasis. I watched my parents move ever further apart in their marriage. There was a morass of non-communication between them. They didn’t talk well about hurt, or sadness, or about the messiness that comes from trying to synchronize two individual lives. Sometimes they did not talk at all.
So we sparred with words last night in the dark until we found our way out of the tangled maze of feelings. So hard to do: to keep talking when the anger rises hot; when all my mind wants to dwell on are escape routes and stubborn silences.
And when light from the street lamps fell in round circles on the pavement of empty streets, we found common ground again and pulled close under the covers. We found our way back to that precious place: skin pressing against skin, against each other’s hearts.