Empty Spaces

Part title

Empty Spaces
"She left me for San Miguel." Those were his exact words. I muffled my impulse to giggle. Recollections of leaving my own marriage because a replacement was on her way seemed much more severe, but in truth, as strange as this story may be in the tellling, when you leave for any reason, it begins to feel like death has come. The unfamiliarly of all the newness eventually begins to become the new life, but in the process, you are strewn about; A leg here, another over there, a hand there, foot there, and a head aware of all the pieces it must pull back together again. Like Humpty Dumpty, you have to do it yourself, because the kings and his horses and no one else can do it for you.

"San Miguel snagged me a time or two," I found myself saying.

It seemed the right thing to say, and it was true anyway. Seems a man might not be so distraught if he thought his wife had been snatched up by another place, instead of another man. As if a place had cast a magic spell, luring her to explore the land and it's people.
Women like to protect. We are socialized that way. We don't want people running around feeling rejected. People always leave for the wrong reasons anyway, just as they usually marry for the wrong reasons. They stay for the wrong reasons, it all makes a perfect kind of sense.

While I'm speculating here, I'd say that if people married for the right reasons, maybe they'd leave for the right reasons, but in the end, someone always gets left..so what difference does it all make?

Life is a stream, you have to keep moving, and you can't get snagged by something in your past and live, no , that's a snag that will hinder you and everyone you chance to meet. When you do, your life is doomed to stagnation, and being stagnant is no more fun than being left, it is just a rut you can't get out of until you're booted. Thank God for boots!

"Will you have dinner with me," he asked. He was a nice man. I said I would. Who was this woman who left her husband for An artist colony in Mexico? I was curious, and he needed a friend.

I drove out to his island home. A nice place with a view of The Bay on one side The Cascade Mountains to the east. We sat on the sofa in front of the coffee table, and looked at his photo albums.

There were spaces where some had been removed, of picture post cards mostly, of trips he and his wife had taken together.

"I took her pictures out", he said. " I got tired of looking at her. "

He had read my thoughts.

I glanced to an imprint on the rug beside where he sat, his eyes followed mine.

There was one recliner in the room, and an indentation where another had occupied an identical space.

"We bought two of them," he said, His voice was solemn.

I wanted to reassure him that things were easier to get than to get rid of.

A woman's touch was everywhere, especially concerning this large vulnerable man, whose words spilled like bombs exploding from his mouth.

" I might just sell this place and move into an apartment."

He was tall, lean, strong, had broad shoulders. I think they no longer carried the weight of protecting her which I could detect a proficiency of, rather, they suggested a vacuum. And he had long capable arms. Empty now, and awkward, as if he didn't know what to do with them anymore.

"You see, one day I came home from work, brown boxes were stacked up there in the hallway by her room where she stayed most of the time."

I could see them there in my imagination just as surely as if they were stacked there.

" I asked her what the boxes were for, and she said she was getting rid of things. I knew the truck would come the next day....Ten years ago she went to San Miguel alone. I couldn't go. She was gone for a week, and had a wonderful time. I guess it got into her blood or something. Then three years ago, she began drinking, lost weight. She said she had to leave, or die.

"I changed the oil in her car so she'd be safe driving to her new home."

He asked if I would read a letter he'd received from her.

I took the letter into my hands, feeling like an intruder, as though I was peering into a woman's lingerie drawer. I felt a sense of intimacy with this woman whose presence was everywhere in this "house without a woman's touch".

You always hear," a woman's touch." Unexpectedly, I'd stumbled into remnants of a woman, in the empty spaces of this broken heart she'd left behind.

"I have told people that she died! That's what it's like for me, just like she died.
She wrote that she has made a friend there in these 3 months that have gone by, and that they help one another with their gardens. They took a trip to Matzatlan together.... They are just friends." He stressed.

Imagine the contrast, him, alone and grieving, her traveling to Mexico, sharing garden work with someone new, visions of feast and visions of famine.

As I read I imagined this couple at the beach laughing, holding hands, vendors selling palm matts, and masks, jewelry. Children playing in the sand, balmy nights, marimbas filling the air and senses with romance. He was trying to convince him self she and this man were just friends, confirmation was being sought through me as I read the letter. Since I'd arrived he'd noticed everywhere I'd looked and read my every thought, answering every silent question as it was forming in my mind.

I wonder if he noticed what was being said in my careful avoidance of his eyes after I had read the letter? I knew the answer too, he hadn't missed a gesture, a blink of my eyes, a downward glance.
Every motion was detected and responded to since I'd walked in the door.

I placed the letter aside and opened the door to the yard where I'd noticed through the windows, the blue hydrangeas growing, a diversion I was happy for. I clipped some and brought them inside. I looked for a vase. Arranging them now, I saw how he carefully watched my movements. I am sure he was seeing a ghost. The memory of and desire for a life that was all he had known, and now was gone. He might have been thinking I could be her replacement. He wanted to reach someone.
I felt awkward.
I only wanted to be a friend.

I was thinking how
I wasn't large enough to be a band aide for this large heartache, how I'd observed how a man has a broken heart and he seeks solace, thinking that if this empty space of yearning just gets filled, everything will be ok.

That's not the way it works. You begin with a man like that, and several years later, you wake up, realizing this relationship has been defined from the first day. You are the replacement, and nothing more. It never changes, this kind of relationship where the empty heart has to fill itself.

I'd seen it before, many friends suffered this dilemma with men they'd been drawn to, men who were careful but appeared open. Some men have layer after layer piled up with various women upon women who have replaced yet another woman, sometimes the Mother, who was never resolved in his heart, too desensitized to feel the pain of vulnerability and finish with one woman before he replaced her with yet another adding misery to a new relationship before it even started.

A vulnerable man is a thing of beauty to a woman.
In vulnerability she sees this strength; openness, courage, things a man doesn't show when all is well. It's easy for a woman to open to this condition in a man, and to be the tender balm. It's like watching a flower open, a lovely, flower, forced into bloom.

Copyright 2019
Jerez Sherry