She looks at this stranger across from her.  Who is this man?  She searches for some sense of familiarity.  There is none.  She is struck by the grayness and aging she sees in his face. She closes her eyes and tries to remember the man she once knew.  The boy really.  She was 17 and he was 21.   He was her first true love and  her first lover.   She fell in love with him or maybe fell in love with love, or maybe just fell, through the door that lead out.  Out of the war zone that most people call home.  She is a survivor.  A survivor of abuse, with all the battle scars to prove it, and a survivor of marriage.   It’s rather ironic, she thinks of them both in the same way now.

She tries to remember  the moment their love stopped, or that she just stopped loving.  Like marking the milestones in life, there should be a marker there.  Maybe it began in the first few months they were married.  She was 7 months pregnant with their first child, and a bride of only 9 months.  So trusting, so naive, so full of wonderful hopes and dreams.   In her 7th month of pregnancy, her idealistic, childhood fantasy was destroyed.  She found the man she had walked down the isle with, sworn to love, honor and cherish, in sickness and in health, till death do us part, with another woman.  Oh, “they were just friends,”  of course.  “I only lied to spare your feelings,”  of course.  “I just needed someone to talk to,”  of course.  Sad isn’t it, 9 months into a marriage and she didn’t understand him, he couldn’t talk to her.  She should have known then but she was young and she forgave him.  It seemed to hard to do anything else. To stand up for herself  meant to admit failure.  Like somehow she had failed to meet his needs.  So she tucked away the pain, burying it deeply, right next to the pain from her childhood.  

But she survives.  She knows the price you pay for survival.  You learn to live with the pain.  The physical pain and the mental pain, they are not so different.  They are destroyers.  Destroyers of  the person she wanted to be.  Stealing her hopes, her dreams, and finally her soul, one piece at a time.  

He never hit her, he could never have done that.  Besides, she swore no one would ever lay a hand on her again.  Her mother had beaten her enough for a lifetime.  For many years he never even raised his voice to her.  He just left her alone.  It was the loneliness that became her prison.  

Time moved on and they learned to coexist.  He avoided confrontation and she became a master of manipulation.  They would always mend the bridge but they could never repair the dream.  Months turned into years.  She tried to regain the newness, the trust, the feelings.  Constantly needing, no demanding, reassurance.  Only to watch her needs build a river between them to deep to cross alone. The bridge had been repaired to many times and was to shaky to stand on.  There was only one boat to reach her and he owned it.  Unfortunately, the only place he took his boat was fishing.  He never came to get her.  

The years passed.  She gives birth to another little girl.  This precious gift, life out of lifelessness.  She pours all that she has into her children, trying somehow to fill the void. She tries to reach him every now and then, tell him what she is feeling.  But he never understands.    Then one day she stops.  Like the death of her innocence, she finally concedes to the death of this existence.  Like a cancer victim, the disease has consumed her.  They are no longer husband and wife but two people who live together for  the sake of the children.  The only joy she knows is the joy of motherhood.  

They come together now and then to relieve their needs.  Even that is more mechanical and at her pleasure.  Sometimes during  that moment she let’s her guard down, desperately groping, praying somehow he will look at her and really see her for the first time.  The ache is pounding so loud she can’t believe he doesn’t hear it.  How can he not see the pain that is swallowing the woman she used to be and leaving this empty shell of a person behind.  From somewhere deep down, a tiny light of the person she used to be shines through. It is quickly extinguished by the darkness and his snoring as he falls asleep, oblivious to the emptiness she is feeling laying sobbing right beside him.

Morning comes and she waits for the words she has memorized so clearly.  He smiles, as always, “ thanks for last night.”   He says it no differently than he says “thanks for breakfast.”  Knowing that only his need was fulfilled.  Her aching to touch, to connect with this human being still remains ripping at the very center of her being. She puts on her practiced smile and accept his kiss on the cheek as payment for a job well done.  He walks the dogs, showers and heads out the door.  He says “I Love You” the same as he has a thousand times before.  He doesn’t notice that for months now she has not replied.  She cannot bring herself to listen to the empty hollowness of her own words.  

Then the predictable happens.  She met a man.  He was not a very handsome man or rich man or out of the ordinary man.  He was just a man.  But one day he reached out to her.  He paid attention to her.  He catered to her every need.  He was experienced.  He knew the fruit was ripe for picking.  He said he loved her, and wanted to marry her, and she believed him.  How naive she was.  She looks back now and cannot help but laugh.  A married woman, having an affair with a married man, who asks her to marry him.  She should have known better.   It did not take long to learn the truth.  She was not the only “other woman” in his life.  She had ended it long before her husband found out.  When he finally learned of her betrayal, he showed an ample amount of righteous anger.  His male ego had been damaged.  But he forgave her, as she knew he would.  She never felt guilty.  As a matter of fact, deep down she knew this would happen.  She felt justified. Like somehow she owed it to him to show him how it feels to be betrayed.  

And when the smoke had cleared, she took the easy way out, again.  She said she loved him.  She wanted to make it work.  She wanted him to love her.  It didn't sound like such an unreasonable request.