Big Island Love

Living in the middle of paradise is not always easy.  It sounds beautiful enough, breathtaking enough, grandiosely abundant enough and it truly is.  My husband and I are at a crossroads.

Our marriage endures flying termites’ crash landing on our bed pillows, as a gingerly placed sweet dreams chocolate.  I awake that night with a termite plastered to my cheek.  Ed makes one of his faces and we search the bed for any others that might have slipped in, while we innocently sleep. 

We endure the complication of step families--his barely tolerate me, mine doesn’t care for one of his and we can never seem to all get together at one time, anyway and who wants to?

We endure verbal mud slinging of the most god awful kind and even though the words melt in the heated passion of our exuberant  and sensual lovemaking, there is not the kind of mutual respect that makes for a decent, healthy relationship over the years.  We will not grow older together, in peace. 

We endure living without a toilet, then living with a compost toilet, which if you ask me, is even worse.  We live without the luxury of running water, a complete lack of windows, doors or screens and store our cold food in two separate coolers, needing to resupply each with a fresh block of ice, daily and empty the collecting, sitting water.  It isn’t as bad as I think.  Still, my husband makes sure that period is soon at a close and purchases a used propane refrigerator.

We endure iciness within our relationship flipping into hot passion that lasts for hours on end, only to more than sometimes close with a silent goodnight, here’s my back to you, ending. 

There are hints of infidelity--he did/she did--and a bond of trust, that is never fully there to begin with, begins to unravel.  There is great love, strong love, obsessive love.  There is choking love, suspecting love, jealous love, gotta have it love and can’t let go love.

We endure eight months living apart and succeed at it without any real scars.  In fact, it seems to bring us closer: we are newlyweds, deeply in love, seeing one another for the first time, again.  Then we devour one another, madly, in sex, in fights, in competition, our teeth gnashing through to the bone.  In anger, in resentment, in fear, in lost hope, in the past that creeps into the present, in abundance. 

One evening, we put a movie into the laptop, and make ourselves comfortable in bed, propping up on our oversize king down pillows.  Previews come on and the movie “Rent,” that I have already seen with my daughter back in Colorado, play.  One of my most favorite songs, “One hundred 25 days ......” begins and tears automatically gush from my eyes.  It is a song that my daughter sings with her school choir--a song that always pulls on my heartstrings.  Hayley’s singing teachers arrange the students dramatically lined-up in the aisles, all the way to the top of the auditorium from the stage, each isle resounding with students gracefully singing that moving song.  I am a sap for these things. 

As I cry, I think of our relationship, because they sing about love and how love is the best gauge of time gone by.  I think of our time, the time we spend together, how it’s gone by and now we will not be continuing it.  It is over.  No more love between us. 

As I cry, I say to Ed, “Aren’t you sad about us?”  (For a moment I experience deja vu and realize that I may say this very thing, when we are first about to separate, a couple of years ago.)  “Uh, huh,” Ed answers, deadpan, staring at the laptop screen.  Then he says, as he watches the next preview, “This is the movie that I really want to see!”  As if I don’t exist. 

We endure the idea of saying goodbye: adios, amigos, tata baby, let’s just be friends, okay?  I wait for the truth, the muddling with the clarity, the sky with the distinct rainbow.  Until then I am satisfied with the little bit of peace in my heart: we finally make a decision, will we stick to it?  We are already halfway there, having verbally made it.  At half a century young, I ride the swing of ambivalence, neither here nor there, wondering when I can firmly walk the ground, again, with my usual air of confidence.

Ruthie Suli Urman