April 2023

I am still married. 

My husband is elsewhere. 

My children sleep in their beds. 

I ready the house and myself for when they wake. I am the center of a seesaw and I keep the balance. I cook, clean, plan, arrange, manage, and listen. I hope my labor is efficient enough that it will be forgotten, that my family will be unburdened by daily domestic stresses. I hold the middle. I hold still. 

Stillness can be a kind of death. 

I tell myself joy cannot exist without misery. True joy, like faith, like love, is proven by its disappearance. A heart must be carved by suffering to be filled with the full power of joy. 

I know this with my brain. It has been some time since I’ve felt such passions with my body. 

Everyone’s midlife must feel this way, warm rushing waters frozen over time. Everyone’s marriage must feel this way.

Outside, the daffodils arrive and open, trumpets of sun. An April nor’easter hits New England and the flowers are pummeled by snow.

---

April 2024

My husband sleeps downstairs. We tell the children it is because he snores. 

I sleep in the closet. I am following an instinct of my body that I do not understand, an instinct for less: less light, less space, less me. 

I find a therapist who I hope will convince me to stay in my marriage. We spend our sessions discussing my husband’s manic and depressive swings. I do not tell her about the panic attacks or that I am sleeping in the closet. 

On the floor, I reach out and touch the walls on either side of me. 

My body tells me everything I have known is ending. My brain tells me it is all my fault. 

I suffer panic attacks and hide in the bathroom until they abandon me. I quiet my voice by stuffing towels inside my mouth. A violence cracks my heart and there is a thunderous splintering down my arms. A frozen pond becoming undone.

Still, that April is the warmest on record. The tulips arrive early alongside the rabbits. I build a makeshift fence with buckets and empty birdhouses, but the vermin still eat the stalks to the ground.

---

April 2025

I am a separated woman—separated from my marriage.

It is Monday after midnight. March has just given way to April Fools. I ready myself for bed inside the nesting apartment I pseudo-share with my husband. He and I switch each night, one of us in the house with our children and the other in this studio apartment. He is here and not here, his life being lived in the alternating space of mine. 

I’ve spent a year thawing, discovering a new self warmed by words and friends and bodies. Desire has been made strange by its absence of love. He, too, has soothed himself with bodies. Even now, we tell each other some truths. 

I fill the apartment with seeds: marigolds, peas, cypress vine, squash. Some sprout after a few days and some take longer. Some never sprout. The sunflowers stand up first and I place them by the window with the shade open. Mornings, I am awoken by a stab of sun. 

That April night, there is a strange scent to the room. I slide into the bed and rub my legs between the sheets. The smell arrives from the pillow. Sweet. Fecund. Vaporous. It is perfume. I turn on the light. I remove the comforter. Lipstick on white sheets. It is a shade more brown than red. It shows me the map of my husband’s most intimate pleasure. Color stains the middle and I imagine rouged lips on engorged flesh. Sweat and secretions soak into fabric, the fabric I have wrapped around my own skin. I try to exhale the perfume from my lungs. I am shocked—not that my husband has a lover, but that he has left the evidence for me to inhabit, a bed made up with dirty sheets. 

The air tolls Over, Over, Over. 

I throw the sheets into the trash. I spend two days crying. Fury and sadness and jealousy quake through me as if these emotions have never before existed. But good erupts through the cracks. There is love and hope and an appreciation for the bellow in my core, a constant message rising through the violent squall. You are not who you were and Let what must come, come.

Stillness, like control, is a grand illusion. I have learned not to trust a sheet of ice. It is truer to be sacrificed to the hungry waters. 

Love and pain stand on opposite ends of a lever. They teeter totter back and forth, up and down, higher and higher until they are launched into the grand churn, that torrent of delights and sorrows and the hot in-betweens, where everything is felt and nothing is clear. 

And finally, I know what it is to be alive.

---

Header photography and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson