2023 in Review. August 2d. The phone rang at 6:30 AM her time, exactly two weeks after we’d tenderly kissed goodbye and I’d driven away at midnight, a fortnight filled with my phone calls not being taken because she was wiped, busy, buzzed, would call me later. “Are you sitting down?” the familiar voice asked.
For three minutes I wordlessly listened to how blessed she was to have known me and how kind and generous I was. How devoted and considerate I’d been when I’d taken care of her after her terrible bike accident when no family member had had the time nor inclination to come visit her during her two days in the hospital or during those first awful ten days of recovery at home, with her displaced front teeth splinted shut to save them, stitches in her eyebrow and from her lip to her nose to close gaping lacerations, her voice barely discernible from a blow to her larynx, contusions all over her body and her head wracked with pain from a concussion.
She continued on about how smart and what a good writer I was, and how much she’d learned from me. I could tell she was reading from a list of bullet points she’d written down beforehand, a lawyer’s trick I’d taught her to do before she undertook any important phone call so she could unerringly stay on point and not be swayed from her main purpose. And she was unswerving in where she was going, everything was in the past tense.
She was wrapping it up. But we were so different! Although we got along so fabulously and had always had such a great time together, now that she was established in her new life so far away, and a long distance relationship was so tenuous no matter how temporary it was, and given how opposite our outlooks and personalities were—her voice gave off a tiny little sob, a manipulative trick in her bag of feminine wiles that I knew well from having heard its use before to create an instant of sympathy and empathy for herself during a highly wrought moment—“We should each go our own separate ways now.”
She paused—it was my turn. I hesitated for a second as thirteen wonderful, blessed months raced in a jumble through my mind. I loved her deeply, and she had said many months earlier, while crying at the realization, that she loved me, but now she obviously wanted nothing further to do with me, I had somehow become a leper to her. In a sudden, three minute termination interview over the phone I had just been discharged.
I remembered how she had definitely kept me sealed off in July from any of her friends back here that she visited when she came back for a week to see her dental specialist, although many of them had seen us as a couple before she’d moved away in February. I drove a thousand miles gallivanting all over with her that week, but I never met even one friend of hers except her friend in Charlotte for two minutes in the driveway in the dark while we unloaded her bags before I drove away to return home, because it had been made clear that there was no room for me in her friend's expansive house that night or by her side during the next two days’ activities either.
And except for her sister, whom I had contacted on the afternoon of her accident in September of 2022 to say that she was in the ER, I don’t think anyone else in her family knew that I existed or that we were in a “serious relationship” all those months, to use her own words to her sister. Or maybe they did, or perhaps they found out from her sister when my presence didn’t fade away after she had fully recovered and effected her move out west, and they were aghast that she was still in a “serious relationship” with a white, East Coast liberal who fervently believed in choice, sensible gun control, and that women or gay persons could serve as pastors or priests every bit as well as heterosexual or sacerdotally celibate men, stances which I had perceived over time to be anathema in whole or in part to some or most of her immediate family members her age.
I thought with an aching heart of the common grief we had shared those many months of close togetherness over our estranged children, a son and a daughter for her and three boys for me, as a result of our separate, bitter divorces and the pernicious influences exerted thereby upon each set of tender children by other, abusive adults (Parental Alienation Syndrome, or "PAS," is a form of abuse--towards children). Now a descent back into that yawning, lonely void, alone again without a friendly voice to share my sorrow with any more, was my immediate and probable long term or lifelong prospect once again.
"Goodbye,” I said. A tiny voice came back, “Bye.” The connection was severed.
