Fog Unplugged

Why did we keep doing this? Round and round and round, but we never hit the bullseye. 

In fact, we haven’t been “a couple” for months and I’m not sure why. We didn’t fight. There’s no big “problem’. We’ve been moving through the litany of our everyday life, leaving in the morning, seeing friends after work, returning to complete the circle at night, but we haven’t connected in a long time. 

For the past few months, it’s felt like I’ve been walking through fog. Apparently, I very much needed to do it. Perhaps I needed the time let the facts rest and settle. Now, today, the fog is beginning to lift. Not lift, really. Retract--no retreat--is more like it.

I know because I’ve studied fog. That’s the main feature of the spring weather pattern here. It doesn’t rain. It fogs. The fog rolls in every night, settles on the ground as if to sleep, and then mid-morning, awakening slowly, it lifts its head and rolls back out to sea, like the waves, but instead of a bumpy, coarse, sandy bottom, the fog reveals a sunshiny, blue-sky day. After sunset, it rolls back in. Wash, rinse, repeat. 

Today, I was out walking the cliffs on my break when the fog started its reverse slide and I could watch the red and yellow wildflowers actually stand up and glow in the sunlight. I cast my mind back to this morning when we went our separate ways to begin our days. Something shifted at the very moment we departed for work. For me, it happened walking to my car.

We had settled the money over breakfast. I think the parting of things tangible finally untangled my emotions. I have always been fascinated by moments in time. The moment something happens: how did it happen, why exactly did it happen precisely then? I mean, a different sentence or word or too long of a pause or too short of a pause or an inflection of speech at breakfast could have changed everything.

I think people stay too long because change is scary, familiar is energy-efficient, easy really, or because they don’t want to admit they made a mistake, or feel like they’re unlovable, or uncompromising, or somehow a bad human being, or don’t want to admit that it died, it ran out of air, it was, after all, finite. This relationship certainly was airless. I can see that now. The clarity came as I walked to my car after breakfast. I won’t be mourning it. I have a friend who carries his dead wife’s bed pillow with him everywhere he travels. He happily pays for an extra suitcase, though the pillow goes in the carry-on. No, this relationship was draining I was constantly worrying about why it didn’t feel right and trying in vain to fix it. I want to shed it so that the soft baby skin beneath it will emerge to grow anew, to perhaps, with luck, try again.

Still, I wonder: how did the relationship lose its mooring? Maybe the constant jostling of the planet loosened its tethers. There’s an earthquake app you can download to your phone and if you set it to report on any quake in the world that registers 2.5 Richter’s or higher, it pulses all bloody day. The earth is constantly quaking. Maybe we, too, are part of that movement. We can hang on to one another for as long as our connection, our mutual attraction or our partnership holds its knots. 

I guess I’m trying to understand why one minute, everything is dark and unknowable, and the next minute you feel liberated and confident, even though you know nothing more about the future than you did the day before, aside from your diverging trajectories. Maybe we hit a moment of clarity without knowing it. It’s like when you’re straining to see a boat on the horizon, so far away you can’t judge its speed, and you’re wondering, is it holding its southerly course or is it course correcting, when suddenly, it turns away. That’s what we did. We course-corrected. 

I didn’t know that avoiding the divvying up of assets had become an anchor, keeping me in place. Walking to the car somehow shook the facts enough that the conclusion settled into my spine and I felt it in my bones. And I turned away.