Us

I’m sitting on top of the toilet seat writing this. I needed some space. My husband is on the couch, it’s his day off, watching sci-fi. I have maybe fifty feet of space. Our bathroom is small and inside here it could feel like a hug or a tight throat. Right now it is warm and comfortable. Words hit me at the strangest times and I’m thankful they come wherever I may be.

I had asked my husband if it was okay to talk about him in this blog. “I was expecting that.” He said this as he turned the stove on to make our morning coffee. I try not to ask him anything too difficult or emotional in the morning because it stresses him out and he will pull on his braids as if to ease the tension in his head. He is six feet two, I am four feet ten. He wears his hair in two braids and has since the pandemic threatened to cut them off. His beard is neat and grey and when it was longer and unruly I would run my fingers through it and get caught in knots. I love it when he picks me up to hug me, I feel safe, almost like I am in a cocoon. But I won’t show.a picture of him. I won’t even tell you his name. I rarely call him by his name and when I do it feels foreign, like I said something wrong. I call him as a question or statement and since the pandemic I plea.

There’s a picture on the bedroom wall right above my dresser. I say “my” because almost all the furniture in our apartment is mine from my last apartment which he moved into before we were married. He had been living on his boat. While his boat was being painted he stayed with me. It was only to be for a few weeks but I didn’t want him to leave, so he didn’t.

The picture is black and white and he is picking me up. We are both smiling so big you can see all of our teeth. It is the same smile I had when I would come home from L.A. and see my family after months away or the one I had when I graduated with my masters in creative writing. I am wearing a crown of wild flowers my friend had made and a rust colored lipstick I had bought two days before. The dress was last minute. My mom and I went shopping to find a wedding dress instead of wearing something out of my closet as I had planned. We got married on the boat. It was docked in the harbor and our families watched from the grass. We were barefoot. The picture holds who we are and who we were in place.

I’m in the sunroom at the small kitchen table I also use as a desk. My husband found this table at a thrift store and it is my favorite table. This is our favorite room. As I write I can look out the window and see the street. The same window in the picture on Google Maps. Behind me is a ladder full of plants.

We are living in “our” first apartment, the one he thinks is too small. He picked out the dining room table which is big and made of a sturdy wood with four swiveling chairs so we can have my parents over for dinner. I let him pick the table. It is not my taste but I was trying to let him in.

This year sadness had taken up space in our small apartment making it feel like three instead of two. When I first told my husband I had bipolar it was our first New Years and we were having breakfast for dinner in our pajamas. Leftover pancakes were on our plates. I sat on his lap and told him my secret. I never had to tell someone I loved before about my bipolar or fear they would leave because of it. He didn’t freak out. He was quiet for a minute, thinking on it, and then he said okay but when he said okay I don’t think he was expecting this. On our fridge a magnet holds up an anniversary card he gave me two years ago. It reads “I Love Us.” We were having a bad morning and I took the card off the fridge and asked him if this was still true. Inside he wrote “we will persist.” I wanted to know if that was true too. I gave him the card and he read it. “It’s true,” he said. I snatched the card away and put it on the kitchen counter. He says I like to test him and that is not untrue but none of this was a test. My bipolar was not a test.

The sadness has spread and I feel bad about that. He has discovered his own sadness separate from mine. We are in family sessions now and he has his own therapist. I will pause him in front of our wedding photo sometimes not to rub in what we were but to show him what we can be again. We are getting a new sofa and I have shown him the picture of the one I like and asked him about the color. It will be our sofa in our apartment. He bought a piece of art, a watercolor from Star Wars, and we are finding a space on the wall together.

I’m in the front room now which is one room away from the sunroom. You walk through the dining room and then left and there I am. It is my favorite room. My husband has just returned home. I call out— but he doesn’t respond. I think it’s because he’s not used to me calling his name. I change my call to something he recognizes- I’m in here. Our place is not very big so he would walk my way anyway. “Hey,” he says as he removes his mask and throws his heavy bag onto the dining room table. “What you working on?” I’m wearing my glasses and he tilts his head and smiles. When I wear them he always tell me I look beautiful and I wonder if he would tell me that now but I say, “The blog.” I’m fidgeting to finish the sentence. I can see he wants to talk .I close the computer and walk from the sunroom through the dining room , the living room and into the bedroom. I stand in front of my dresser and look at us hanging so nicely framed on the wall. I think of the word “together”, I think of us, of us then and us now. I say the word “together” but not aloud. I am not saying my needs aloud. I am hoping he will come into the bedroom and stand next to me. Maybe he would put his arm around me, bend over and kiss me on the head. He might say “look at us” as if he were seeing an old photo of a couple he knew long ago. I stand in front of the photo way to long. I’ve been working on the last sentence to the blog way to long. I’m not sure how all of this will turn out.