President's Day

 I woke up this morning on the futon in the spare bedroom. My back hurts but my soul feels better.  

Last year this room was your home office. The year before it was mine. Now I work in the basement with a full spectrum desk light and a space heater roasting away at my feet. It's another way to make sure you don't see me. 

See me writing or thinking or dreaming. Because I am too afraid to tell you of my visions of life going forward. For the first time they do not include you, and I feel bad. You don't have any friends other than professional, at least friends you tell me about.  

You work from home too. At first we thought it would be wonderful and it was. We could always be here for the kids, no matter if they had to stay home from school sick. We could steal time from our companies and use it on frivolities, spending their hours like found money on martini lunches and 15-minute love sessions. 

But then you began to travel. Every few weeks. Every other week. Every week. At first you would call me and the kids many times a day. Then not at all for days. I would wait, so stupidly, worrying my mind. 

When you came home you wouldn't leave the house except to get cigarettes. The kids would wonder when you were arriving back, even though you were upstairs.  

When I was in the emergency room in December you said "I love you" to me on the phone. It made me happy.  Then I heard you say it to your boss. I never want you to say that to me again.  

The kids have off from school today and you have to work. 

I made them breakfast and drink coffee while you slept in. I am printing up directions to the museum and you are checking your text messages in what used to be our bed.  

Wait, I can hear you creaking the floorboards above our heads. I hear the toilet flush over the sounds of "Word Girl" on PBS. You just came down and hugged the kids, put on my winter hat and went out back to smoke a Spirit. 

I told you that I am reading the news. Because saying that I opened an anonymous blog to honestly write about our reality - more twisted than the miles-long strands of DNA in every cell of every living thing - would be embarrassing.  

But my open secret is that I want you to read it.  This blog is now my self-centered ego-seeking, self-aggrandizing, self-deprecating one-sided therapy and really a naughty affair.

 I don't need anyone taking pictures of it and sending it to you. But if you happen to spy my eyes kissing the screen... 

It started as a base impulse, an early morning product of a boxed wine hangover to open a valve to the flow of some sort of honesty. It is just for me.

This blog is like a psychological stripper who dances for me and lets me express the primal side of heartbreak.  But now it is for you too. 

Like any affair I want to get caught. But perhaps I have done too good a job. Perhaps I have built up such a facade of living every day that even if you read this you would not see me in it.  

My disguise is too good at this grand costume ball. 

I think I just understood something new about you - maybe I see the edges of the mask you never let fall.