I am stuck. I can’t stop thinking about him. The whole night we spent together. I thought I was okay with this. I thought I had moved past so many things. I laid out better precautions. Ian and I meet almost every year at holiday time. I don’t want to do it, but I can’t say no when he calls and asks to meet. At least this year I tried to be smarter, I thought I was being so sharp. My choice of meeting ground, neutral territory, a bookstore, no convenient bedroom nearby to completely confuse the issues. So we went to dinner and then we spent twelve hours in his borrowed car, talking through the entire night.

What am I going to do? I want him so badly. I want to be wife to him again, to make things better. It’s the nearness of him, the listening, the being wanted, needed so badly. It’s knowing how much pain I cause him and how much happiness he thinks my return would bring him.

The full force of the irony is incredible. If I were financially independent right now, if I weren’t still paying off the horrendous debt from the marriage incurred years ago, I would be able to move back up to Virginia, to give us a chance again by crossing the 1100 mile geographical gap between us. Amazing how that worked out. I want to go so badly, to try again, to pretend that we could get back together, that he’s doing better, that we could be happy together, but I can’t because of the debt from the first year of our marriage.

I can’t help but laugh. It is a very bitter sound.