If You Ever Find This...

Emotional distance in marriage sucks — I know. But lately I have been facing so many challenges at once that I can't seem to bring myself together, let alone update my journal. There are days when I think about writing, when I know I probably should write because this whole thing was supposed to be a record of what happens when life goes completely off the rails and you try to put it back together, but then the day gets swallowed by everything else happening inside my head and around me, and suddenly writing about it becomes another thing on the list of things I haven't managed to do.

A quiet night, an open journal, and the kind of love that stays even when I am not fully myself.

However, through all of that, there is my wife. I genuinely don't know where this woman continues to find so much love, passion, compassion, understanding, patience, and whatever else she somehow manages to pull out of herself for me. It takes one hell of a woman to deal with what she deals with on a daily basis, and while I want to make something very clear — I am in no way physically abusive — I am also aware that living beside someone whose mental and emotional state is where mine currently is cannot be easy. When something reaches into the darkest corners of your mind, soul, and body, it does not stay neatly contained inside you. It spills over. It affects the people who love you, whether you intend it to or not.

And I am not only talking about physical absence. I am talking about emotional absence, mental absence, financial absence.

Sometimes I am simply not all there, and I know how terrible that sounds because technically I am there — sitting in the same room, sleeping in the same bed, drinking coffee in the same kitchen — but a person can be physically present and still somehow be thousands of miles away. My brain gets so occupied with everything happening inside it that sometimes it completely removes us from the picture. Our wants, our needs, the small things partners are supposed to notice about one another, the things that make a relationship feel like a relationship instead of two people simply surviving beside each other.

Sometimes I look at myself and wonder what exactly there is to love at the moment. A dead man walking? A zombie? I know I am not completely gone, but there are moments when I feel disturbingly close to it, as though I am functioning just enough to technically qualify as present while most of me is somewhere else trying to put out fires nobody else can see.

It is a tough battle for both of us, and sometimes I honestly think it may be harder for her than it is for me. At least I have access to my own brain. As unpleasant as that place can be right now, I know what is happening in there. I hear every thought, every fear, every ridiculous scenario, every argument I have with myself, and every explanation for why I suddenly become quiet, distant, irritated, distracted, or completely unavailable. She doesn't have that luxury. She only has what she can see and what she can feel, and then she has to build her understanding from that. She cannot sit inside my head and watch the process happen. She cannot know that sometimes my silence has absolutely nothing to do with her, because all she experiences is the silence. All she sees is the man sitting next to her who suddenly seems somewhere else.

And God knows, she has an annoyingly good feeling for things anyway. I swear sometimes she senses something before I have even admitted it to myself.

I could not be more grateful to have her beside me, but I can't exactly imagine her waking up every morning thinking, Thank God I have this mentally and emotionally unstable man next to me. What a catch. There is some dark humor in it, I suppose, because what else are you going to do sometimes? You either laugh at how absurd your life has become or you sit there staring at the wall, and I've already done enough of the second one.

The important difference now is that I finally understand much more about where this state is coming from, and I am working hard to fight it. Sometimes I genuinely think of it like a disease. It starts small, almost harmless, something you convince yourself you have under control, and then one trigger appears and suddenly there is an avalanche. One thought becomes ten, ten become a hundred, and before you know it, something that started in one small corner of your life has managed to spread into everything else.

The funny thing is that I started writing this post with an entirely different subject in mind. I actually had a whole story prepared, and somewhere between the first sentence and wherever the hell I am now, I apparently abandoned it and started writing about my wife. There you go. Exhibit A: persistence and dedication. I can't even stay on topic in my own journal.

But maybe that isn't necessarily a bad thing this time.

If getting completely sidetracked means that this entry ends up being dedicated to my wife and gives me an opportunity to say something about who she is and what she has done for me, then so be it. At least I can say that's one thing I'm good at. I had the other story written. I proofread it. I was ready to publish it. It can wait.

This is more important.

Honey, if you ever find this journal — and there is every possibility that one day you will — I want you to know how grateful I am to have you in my life and how blessed I feel every morning knowing that you are there and that, despite everything, I still get to call you part of my world.

I know there are moments when you wonder whether or not I still love you. I know because, if our positions were reversed, I probably would too. I know the coldness you sometimes feel from me, and I know what that does to a person. When someone you love becomes distant enough, you start wondering whether the distance is temporary or whether you have simply stopped being important to them. You start questioning whether you are loved at all, whether they still see you, whether the relationship exists in the same way for them as it does for you.

I know I have given you reasons to ask yourself those questions, and I hate that I have.

So I want to answer them here, as plainly as I can.

Yes, I love you. And yes, you are important to me. More than I probably manage to show you right now, and certainly more than my behavior sometimes communicates. The battle I am fighting at the moment is difficult, and I know that what I feel for you does not always reach the surface in the way it should. That may explain some things, but it does not magically make them easier for you, nor does it mean you should have to understand everything forever while I remain exactly the same.

I have work to do. A lot of it.

And part of getting myself back has to include becoming present again, not only for myself but for you, because you did not sign up to spend your life standing next to a ghost and trying to convince him that he is still alive.

Over the last year, we have been through a lot. More than I ever imagined we would have to go through, and certainly more than I would ever have chosen for us if life had given me a menu and asked what I wanted. My hope now, and a huge part of the work I am trying to do, is directed toward reaching a point where we can look back at this period and realize how far we came from it. I want us to look back one day and see not only how much we survived, but how much we grew, and hopefully how much stronger we became because we refused to allow the worst period of our lives to decide what the rest of our lives would look like.

I love you. I do.

And knowing everything I know now, knowing the difficult parts as well as the beautiful ones, I would still choose you all over again. The difference is that if I were somehow given the chance to do it all over again, I would want to do a much better job of being the man beside you. I would want to be more present, more stable, more dependable, and more capable of giving you and providing for you at the level I believe you deserve.

You have carried more than your share, and I know that.

One of the reasons I am fighting as hard as I am now is because I want to reach the point where you can finally put some of that weight down.

Maybe one day we will read this together and laugh at how dramatic I was. God, I hope so. I hope this becomes one of those old entries that feels almost strange because the people reading it barely recognize the life described in it anymore. I hope we look at each other and think, Jesus Christ, we really went through that.

And then I hope we close the page and get on with whatever came next.

— Maximus Rayne