Word Count: 373
The dinner was just a disguise with tables and chairs as the props, the restaurant a stage where we dressed up and made small talk and pretended to still love one another.
The waiters were bit players with small walk-ons and stage lefts and they hovered in the wings to wait for their cues.
This was our traditional her-birthday dinner, number sixteen I believe, if you count the two years before we were married. She loves rituals and routines, lives each year around them as others may look to the first frost of late autumn or the bright burst of forsythia shouting “spring!” I used to think it adorable, one of the things I loved best about her, that innocent delight in the Christmas tree swathed in lights and shimmering tinsel. Or the surprise over each little gift on her birthday. The golden-brown Thanksgiving turkey. Each met with such honest amazement as if she’d never seen it before.
Perhaps if there had been children, someone who’d never grow tired of the wonder, someone who would have shared her excitement and glowed with the same level of light.
I just grew weary of trying to keep up with her. With the worries of juggling money and bills and the constant uncertainty and stress in my job, it got harder and harder to smile, to forget or even just relax now and then. She honestly felt above it all, let the struggles wash over and roll back out to sea. She never seemed to get wet while I fought not to drown.
We talk about weather and skate just the surface of politics. When the meal comes we talk about that. Sometimes I think we could live out our lives safely like this, and if not in enjoyment at least in some standard contentment. But there, I just caught a look that tells me it would be impossible to maintain it, to keep the glass bowl of our lives in one piece.
She knows, you see; she knows that I’m thinking of leaving. But in her own way of handling what comes at her, she acts as if nothing is wrong. And that, above all, is the problem that I can’t overcome.
