The Bird & The Fish

I’ve been in the U.K  for nearly 3 weeks now.  It really is as though I never left.  My life with Vanny continues in a happy cycle of meal planning, food shopping, wine drinking, cinema going and clothes shopping.  We are both currently obsessed with Waitrose muscles in Thai sauce and ripe and fatty goat’s cheese.  I have morphed (and that really is the best word for it) from someone living on a diet of crackers and back of the cupboard pickled goods to a complete obsessive foodie. Vanny and I scour the papers for new recipes and spend many a happy hour wandering around Waitrose/Lidl/the Fruit and Veg market looking for new and exciting food adventures.  We are back on the evening glass of pink Californian rose with olives and other pre-dinner snacks.

Our latest gourmet extravaganzas are duly eaten in front of the telly, usually to the visuals of Eastenders after which we will scrutinize the T.V listings for the evening entertainment.  We really are a little old married couple, quite content in our domestic routine.

Love is about sharing.

Of course I’m not married to Vanny.  My real Husband is out in the void. Silent.  Unable and unwilling to speak to me.  I can’t say I blame him really.  What do you say when your wife phones you up to discuss future plans and in the middle of a fairly routine conversation utters the wholly unimaginative words, “I just can’t do this anymore. I don’t want to be married.”  I imagine the Husband wanted to scissor-kick me in the back of the head or punch me in the ovaries.  Instead he muttered something about getting his suit back at which point I dissolved into tears and we duly imploded.

I think I was as amazed by the turn of events as the Husband was.  It was like an out of body experience my mouth was suddenly forming these words that I felt powerless to stop and once they were out, well there really wasn’t any coming back from that.  And so we are now trapped in silence.  Removed from each other and our marriage.  My Husband is, I think, too angry to talk to me and I am too cowardly and inept to explain myself.  I know we can’t go back to the way we were living, all that distance slowly growing bigger between us, but we don’t know any other way -it is how we have lived through 5 years of marriage.  

We both heard the ice cracking under us, we even stopped to acknowledge it, but neither of us made a move towards solid ground.  In our 7 years together we have repeated the same pattern of apart and togetherness, but it always seemed temporary, sustained by love and hope that one day we would live together in our happy or at least mildly conventional ever after.  But somewhere following my 30th birthday and 5 months of living on my own as a single-married -eating meals for one, changing light bulbs and making new friends - I awoke to the desperate feeling that time was running out.  I lost my hope; this was never going to end.  We, our marriage is/was the embodiment of Einstein’s quote, ‘Insanity; doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results’.

I think of my Husband with a dull pain in my chest.  I am amazed that the person most precious to me could become such a stranger so quickly.  I want to phone him up and reassure him.  I want to hear him call me ‘mushroom’, but there is no point until there is an answer to the riddle ‘A bird may love a fish, but where will they build a home?’

So our marriage dies in silence, with distance.  There are no plates smashed in passion against a wall.  No heated snotty arguments. No voices raised in protestation and recrimination.  No way to say I still love you, I just don’t know how to live with you.  Instead it seems we will slip away from each other into the Ether in tacit agreement until a continent rests between us.