six and a half months

Remember for your 35th birthday M. got you plans for a triple wide trailer. Maybe she knew you were absolutely serious when you said your idea of heaven was sitting on the porch of your triple wide having a beer and no other house in sight, just cows and whoever drove out to see you. Likely she thought you were joking, but I knew you weren’t. You were a worldly guy in experiences but a simple one in preferences, especially if what you liked well enough was cheap.

Your brother called you a contradiction, because you wanted cows and you wanted to live in China and you wanted to go to the moon. I don’t think he understood that these quirky ambitions were not at all conflicting and in fact were a product of your vast, always-querying intellect. Maybe he thinks because he graduated from the same engineering program he is as smart as you, and maybe grade-wise he was, but he lacks the open-mindedness you had (and I am not just saying this because of the distinct coolness that is now between us, post-divorce.) I’ve found the most intelligent people are almost always the least judgemental - literally, they reserve and sometimes never reach or express judgement in almost every situation and especially those involving less intelligent people expressing ardent opinions about nonsense.

You made me so much better in every way. Living with an incredibly smart person is like living with a powerful lamp on all the time, shedding light where it was dark before, adding warmth to life, attracting the curious and the similarly bright.

But he was so humble, M. has commented a few times. Your intellect was something people had to detect for themselves, you subverted all the typical social cues, wearing unfashionable clothes and shoes that sometimes bordered on the hideous.

S. and I were laughing about a night out, having martinis and playing Never would I ever, the goal of the game being to find out where someone’s absolute no-go sexual limit is/was. Mine was sleeping with my boss, which came as no surprise to S. and which was *somewhat* surprising to you which I wasn’t indignant about because no man every thinks any man that is his twin on paper - middle class, educated, funny, not ugly etc - is too repellent to have sex with, and that’s as it should be, the mating dance is hard enough without a guy’s confidence taking an extra pummeling is my view. You of course were a million times the man that J. was.

J. used to say “Poor C” at random intervals, laughing, as if it was a well known fact you were somehow putting up with me. This enraged me of course but that’s what he was after, proof he could get under my skin. J. had a housewife for a partner and a bunch of kids (not that there was anything wrong with that), and didn’t know what to make of a woman that wasn’t the same as his wife. So the put downs (mixed in with endless comments about my looks) despite me being a faultless, work-90+-hours a week employee that you were constantly having to call and say, when are you coming home? You got it though. After the falling out with him (which shocked me but not you), we had a deal that if J. deigned to show up to my funeral you and B. were going to give him the bum’s rush out the door to the street, and then you’d explain to him S. wants you to know that she loved you but said no way will you mill around the casket with people who hung in there with her, bye. I’m super glad he didn’t read your obituary and come to your funeral which would have been only a two hour drive for him. We’d never said anything about bum’s rushing him from *your* funeral. Luckily he did not show and I was not forced to have to think about the correct course of action on your behalf.

The real punchline of playing the game Never would I ever, of course, was your own line in the sand, drawn firmly at giving a man a blowjob, you would not go there no matter how we juiced up the offer: a million dollars and a certificate of perfect health from the recipient and a really good looking guy to boot, your choice even, but you were unmoved (which surprised me, because it was easy money). Apparently you had a similar thought in the night because you woke up the next morning and S. came down for breakfast and when you said “I was really silly, I’d like to change my mind, I’m no homophobe and for that money why wouldn’t I?” how we all howled with laughter. You were serious but maybe relieved not to have to prove it.

You didn’t want to get tied down with kids too early and neither did I and though we never planned to have children we never planned not to. Every once in awhile I’d check in with you or you’d check in with me, usually something along the lines of “If we had to decide right now, it’s now or never, would we get pregnant?” And we were both no, most of the time.

Once, you said yes, you’d pick having a kid over never having one. But since the ultimatum wasn’t real at that moment - we were early thirties - we didn’t do anything about it. For about a year, I suddenly developed a case of baby fever, no other word for it. I, who had been aloof to the point of rudeness to women with infants in airplane seats next to me, had become the one who would swoop in to coo at, comfort or just stare at any baby, anywhere. But again, no reason, we never pulled the trigger, or rather never stopped the pill.

Our lives were busy, full of travel and complete enough in friends and family, it was difficult to imagine children into. Many of our closest friends were also DINKs, whether by coincidence or self-selection. You were mad at me for bringing home a dog without your explicit permission but I’d been asking for so long and you kept saying yes but not now. You never believed my willingness to hand him over to my sister, should you absolutely balk, but that was our plan and I was sticking to it. He was cute but I was a bit overwhelmed by the responsibility and I wasn’t ready to make you really angry. But you melted almost immediately and he was with us for the next 18 years, almost the entire length of our marriage and traveling to three different cities with us. We were a pack, we three. You used to come home from a trip and pour a glass of wine, put on some music and wander around the house with the wine glass in your right hand and all six pounds of the dog tucked into the crook of your left arm where he would ride happily. It was a real wrench when he died, us newly separated. I felt unmoored from the world. I tried to call my parents when I was sad but Dad would get so upset, scolding me that I would make myself sick crying so much and handing the phone to mom. They loved you and never stopped loving you but they cannot handle my grief, it is just too hard for them. Still no one shies away from mentioning you, so you come up naturally in conversation and usually I can manage not to cry, and these moments make me happy.

I was mad when mom took down our wedding picture from the family picture wall after the divorce. I guess she thought she was being thoughtful to the man who became my new husband but I was still mad. There is no sense pretending the past is gone or can be erased. I think I’m alone in this thought - I think most people want the exes to come out of the picture frames and down from the places of prominence on the wall for good reason, but there was never any bitterness or anger between us. Just sadness. They don’t get that it would be way way less sad to see you smiling up on their wall among the family that loved you, than just missing, squeezed out by replacements. I read somewhere, a girl talking about grief, saying The memories don’t go just because the relationship does. Neither does the love.

Remember that guy in the softball league we played in, the umpire who called us Robocouple? I thought of myself as Wonder Woman to your Superman. I loved playing in a softball league with you. I loved learning to ski with you, and all the time we spent teaching each other how to get better at it. I loved waking up on a Saturday or Sunday morning and driving through dark quiet streets to the starting lines of all the races we ran, starting with a 5k, a 10k, a 10 miler, then a half marathon, then marathon after marathon. I loved the long training runs in those early days, trying to get 20 miles in and having to carry food and water in our hands or stash someplace along the route (often an unlovely road busy with cars), complaining about the the lost toe nails, the blisters that had to be popped in order to walk, the bloody chafing until through experience we learned hacks to avoid all that stuff. For years after the divorce (and still) I ran alone, and at races I almost always will spare a thought for you, standing by myself and shivering in a crowd it sometimes seems like every single runner has a friend, a running partner, someone to talk to except me. I’ll look around observing the wickable technical clothing and the nipple guards and the energy gels and hydration packs and the fancy shoes and a mental me will turn to a mental you and say Kids these days don’t know how easy they’ve got it and our mental selves always have a good laugh before the race is on and I have to go.