Reviewing the Evidence

How do I enter this space- this space I want to write about? 

For weeks I have been contemplating a memoir selection for class. My Eureka!-moment suggested a structure built on a tornado of grief, swirling in and around the five stages grief I experienced and experience over the end of my marriage. 

What I am finding is five stages can't hold my grief. Can't begin to address addiction. Can't possibly contain my story.

Thus- I am left without a stage, but with a thought. An elegiac memory. A picture of denial. Could they both be true? Could both exist truly at one shared instant?

The instant is a photograph.

Rather, a series of photographs. 

Taken by my ex.

On my birthday.

In the series of eight photographs, I am wearing a black dress draping over my shoulders, nearly falling off and covering my thighs, but not my knees, my calves, or my bare feet. I am perched on the back of a black couch, legs outstretched. There is a person, hard to see, laying on the couch (visible by an upreached arm in the eighth). I am in front of a wall containing a window. There is a lot of light shining through the window (from a kitchen). It is in black and white.

[What is happening in this picture is that I am dramatically retelling the story of our 12-course meal at Allinea in Chicago where I went to celebrate my 29th, Golden, birthday with my best friend, her husband, and my husband. (He bought a suit. It looked like he should wear it to a funeral. But oh, he was cute to me.) After the dinner we went to a club. It is now about four in the morning and I am explaining our dinner, drunkenly, animatedly, to my best friend's sister.]

There are many things about this series of photos that makes me cringe. My nose, always, for instance, annoys me. It looks so different on film than I imagine it looks on my face. My hair is frizzy. My arms look beefy. My eyes have their typical photo-demonic glare. My chin is dissatisfying. The dress is not nearly as glamorous as I remember.

But, still.

If I may be vain for a moment, there is something I love about the me in these pictures. Something everyone in the room loved. 

I remember being swept up in the story, in describing the deconstructed edibles, the shooters of celery, white chocolate, and horse-radish, the gelatinous Guiness squares laying neatly over beef, the bacon glazed and strung on a bow. I remember the life-love serum that was flowing through my veins. 

I remember my friend saying to my husband, "Are you getting this?"

And he nodded, pointing the camera, still, in my direction.

He captured these images. He thought to pick up the camera. To frame my exuberance. My love. 

Though there are ungraceful angles of my chin and my shoulders seem bulky, there are delicate gestures in my wrists and my ankles that allow me to fall a little in love with myself. My fingers gesture like pirouettes and my eyebrows are ballerinas. 

I was happy in this moment.

This moment, 36 days before my life fell apart.

Of course, that is not the truth.

The truth is my life was falling apart. Had been. Maybe always was. My whole life- a collision course for August 5th, 2007. 

And so, I ask of the picture--was it happiness? Was it love? Was it denial? Was it false?

****

There were many pictures that summer.

The pictures from the summer before were of a different sort. Pictures that stimulated me as I traced my husband's cyber-footsteps even as they nauseated me. Pictures that held me sometimes for hours as I backtracked over url addresses and scrolled through our history, our secret files hidden in other files on the computer.

The pictures of other women, of other women with other men, pulled my husband out of my bed at early hours and kept him watching late at night. 

These pictures, pictures that moved, that spoke, that purred, that moaned, fed the constantly growing sorrow that eclipsed the love of two young people wanting desperately to make best what they could of companionship, of a sort-of love. Of a really-love. 

Let's be honest.

****

Could my husband love me when he could only lie to me? Could he be intimate with me when his addiction was a crueler mistress than I? She was the jealous one. The one making him call every night. The one pulling him ever from me. 

His body betrayed the one he answered to. But did it mean he loved her more?

****

How could both truths of this image exist? How could this be both a picture of my love, my joy and also my denial, my fear? How could he love me enough to capture this series and then love me so little it was no trouble for him to turn me out of the house when I said I wanted a divorce?

****

There is another image of that weekend. Another photo taken by my ex. In it, I am asleep to my consciousness. It is from the previous morning. I am lazy. Reluctant to roll out of the futon. I am unaware I am being photographed. My head turns down toward my left shoulder, my breasts under a pink tank top point at the camera, my right arm is bent at the shoulder and tucking my hair up around the crown of my head, my left arm rests, almost suggestively, against on top of my left hip bone. Again, my nose annoys me. Again I am dismayed by my chin. Again I see the love in this photo. The love that compelled my ex to pick up the camera and capture this image, his wife slow-weekend waking up. 

****

This is why things were complicated.

This is why it was hard to leave.