Off he goes...

Pants left this morning in high spirits for a two-week detachment in Key West, home of the permanent spring break. I drove M. and him to the base early, when the air was still cool and promising fall and the light hadn't yet graduated from tender pink to the flat, bright tan we've had lately, muffled by the haze from nearby forest fires. The air when it's like this stings the eyes in a constant low grade irritation that your brain just filters out, but the faint smell of smoke still rings an alarm deep in the brain stem each time you step outside. Things have been like that for us too, lately-- a constant, low grade irritation with each other that occasionally strikes us as upsetting.

So maybe it's not polite, and maybe it's not exactly the most supportive way to put it, but... Thank God he's gone for a while.

Back when we first got married and I quit my job so we could move cross-country together to a newly flattened disaster zone where everyone's roof was a blue tarp and hideous, phlegm-triggering pink mold grew behind the walls everywhere, I found moving in together, co-mingling all our stuff and drawing no boundaries in money or furnishings, to be a huge, jangling shock. Maybe it was for him, too. I can remember a big goopy joy at standing in our new closet and seeing all our clothes hanging together and being able to reach out and touch his T-shirts with my left hand and mine with my right, and seeing all our shoes lined up together, but soon that mingling lost its marvel and I found myself taking long showers in the little room off the master bedroom vanity, the closet-like one with the toilet and the shower hunched together in kind of a gross paradox. This was the only room that was mine. Pants preferred the guest bathroom with its larger and more traditional layout, and shuttled his manly gray and blue shampoo bottles over there.

Mine. I'd lock the door and read in there, or soak in baths until the water turned tepid, not fully understanding why this was the only room in the house I didn't feel panicked in.

We really need our own space, "we" in the larger, universal sense, and "we" in the particular Pants and me sense. Before he left it felt like the air in the house was getting hazy with smoke of some dull alarm. We'd collide into each other and retreat with the same phrases, the same limp embrace, like ions losing their charge. Farts, Pants's signature joie de vive song, even became tiresome and unfunny.* The fact that I was spending less and less time at home and more time at work or reading or writing for school seemed to help, but then we'd lose touch on some trivial/crucial daily living detail, like how many minutes there were left on the cell phones, and we'd have to come back together again and feel the awful limpness and static in our communication. Jokes were heard as barbs, silences as accusations, and a ten minute conversation would drag out into a 40 minute, grating ordeal with tears and tangents on my part, defeated hand gestures on his.

*Once when my brother and I were falling asleep on the roll-away beds on my grandmother's screened in back porch over the Christmas holidays, I farted and after a silent minute, crumbled into hysterical, muffled giggles. He was depressed, mooning over some girl, and said acidly, "Oh, Rachel, grow up." I responded with a declaration I've held to firmly ever since: "I don't want to live in a world where farts aren't funny."

Further complicating matters are my neck muscles, which have again decided to out my simmering anxieties by knotting themselves into bloodless rocks and farming out aches and numbness to my arms and scalp. Fucking thanks. The Sears mattress from hell (the embodiment of a complex ethical dilemma about not encouraging the bad business practices of others by continuing to do business with them) has once again become untenable for me, and so for the past week I've moved into the guest bedroom to sleep on the king-size hand-me-down from my parents. Our bed situation is embarrassingly intermeshed with our communication difficulties, as it turns out: the queen-sized bed we bought together at great expense is a dud, a painful crippling dud which amplifies my already jacked up muscle situation to an excruciating volume. The king-sized bed, however, is too large. We lose each other on it and fall into a restless search-and-retreat pattern that keeps both of us from sleeping.

So a combination of new job/new school/off-balance relationship binds my shoulders, neck, and arms, the bed makes them worse, I retreat to the other bed, and Pants refuses to follow because he's already comfortable, the fan's in here and he doesn't want to move it, he doesn't sleep well on the other bed. We're in separate bedrooms one night and then the next it gets easier and easier, and pretty soon we run out of cell phone minutes, argue, and I move my alarm clock. And then the detachment.

Ironically, I think this is just what we needed. A change in the wind or a front is what it will take to blow the smoke out of town, and for us, a detachment now does almost the same thing. We can get clear, and then figure out what started the fire, maybe.

It wasn't always like this-- in fact, this is the first detachment I've actively welcomed. Before it seemed like me getting beached somewhere while he cruised out to a new horizon. Financially, that feeling was pretty accurate, since as with all things expense-wise, the military deficit spends-- you front your living costs out of pocket and then a couple of months later on, God willing, your paperwork will get approved and now-unfamiliar chunk of cash will descend like manna. But this time I'm thankful. I have a lot to concentrate on, and I can make my own retreat here, to whit:

Today's completed tasks:

1) Launched husband and husband's friend. Took their coffee cups home and dumped them upside down in dishwasher. We may have just acquired a new mug.

2) Picked up a few cleaning supplies and some decidedly hippie groceries, and spent two hours scouring the house, knowing that for the next two weeks, I will be the author of my own messes, and not the editor of someone else's.

3) Spent all day reading a delicious book for school devoted to the science and poetry of the senses (A Natural History of the Senses, by Diane Ackerman). Underlined copiously and commented out loud. Filled margins with semi-obscene marginalia and doodles to help me connect themes. Loved it.

4) Embarked on a luxurious and purposeful enjoyment of more Netflix anime: "Kiki's Delivery Service," another Murakami film. Teared up and laughed, without embarrassment.

I can feel things clearing already, and I hope the same is happening in Key West.