We were terribly close when we first married. We did everything together. Wed fall asleep in each others arms, watch telly in bed, take Sunday walks through the park, and laugh over the silliest things. Our intimacy came oftensometimes planned, but more often out of nowhere. I felt cherished, wanted, chosen.
As the years went by, we remained close, but it was different somehow. The long kisses faded away, replaced by quick pecks that seemed more habit than feeling. There were no more gentle caresses, just the usual passing touches. We began going to bed early, both tired, and hed simply turn over to his own side. At first, Id move closer, reach for his hand or gently touch his back, trying to find his palm in the dim light. He always said he was tired, that perhaps tomorrow, that now wasnt the right time. I understood, or at least I thought I did.
Time passed and nothing changed. We still had supper together, chatted about our days, shared the same bed, but nothing else really happened. I started lying there, still and hopeful hed reach out first, but he never did. At first it stung, then I began to feel embarrassed even to try. I wondered if something was wrong with me, if I was making too much of it all.
There was a kind of closeness in our routine, but it felt completely neutral. Wed wake up together, share a cuppa, attend family gatherings side by side. Hed tell me his news, I’d share mine. We slept back-to-back. Eventually, I stopped bothering to change gracefully in front of him, just got into bed quickly, not thinking much about it. Stopped wearing nice nightwear. I ceased to see my body as something anyone could care for.
I tried to talk with him about it, more than once. I asked him if he no longer wanted me. He said that wasnt ithe just didnt have the urge anymore. That it was natural as time went on, that love was about companionship and respect. I nodded along, even though inside I felt an odd emptiness, as if something terribly important was missing, but I had no words for it, nor the will to protest without feeling guilty.
Over time, I told myself this was all perfectly normal. There are couples who live this way, arent there? If there are no arguments, things must be alright. I learned to accept being held only at family dos, never touched in private. I learned not to expect, not to wish, to push that part of myself away so I wouldnt feel rejected.
Years went on, and we carried on being very close. Always together, always orderly. No one would have guessed that wed not been close, not really, for over fifteen years. Even I no longer knew what it felt like to be desired, to be a woman next to someone. Id become a habit, a comfort, a presencenot a longing.
The day he told me he was leaving, that hed met another woman, I couldnt quite take it in. He said that with her, he felt alive, wanted, connected. I didnt shout or argue. He simply said it, and I finally understoodhis feelings hadnt vanished; hed only stopped feeling that way with me.
When I look back on it now, I realise the most painful thing wasnt that he left. It was how, little by little, Id grown used to living beside someone who didnt see me as a woman anymore, and had convinced me that this was just how things were meant to beIt was that, long before he walked out, I had already left myself behind.
For so many years, Id folded myself smaller and smaller, pressing my hopes into the corner of a shared bed, smoothing my dreams into the spaces between our words, hiding every hungry bit of me for fear of making him uncomfortable. And when he closed the door that last morning, suitcase rolling behind him, I noticednot the ache of an endingbut the vast and startling silence all around me. I stood in it, at first uncertain, and then realized how much of me there still was, waiting to be remembered.
I brewed my tea and sat at the kitchen table, sunlight tumbling through the window, hands cradling the warm mug. I tasted the tea: sharp, sweet, honest. For the first time in years, I listened carefully to the quiet hum of my own heart and wondered, for the briefest moment, what I might want, with no one there to turn away from me.
And in that lonely, glorious morning, I promised myself that I would not disappear again.
