Weekly Writing – November 11 2023

I can walk out the front door into the wide, busy, surprising world and do whatever I want. But he can’t, and so I stay.
He smiles at me across the breakfast table at 9:34 exactly every morning. At least, the mornings when I manage to match up my schedule to his. I don’t know what he does if I don’t wake up or make it out of the shower in time. Probably the same thing, smiling, staring across the table into empty space.
He says the same things – looks like rain later, even if the sky outside is a clear, perfect blue, and I think I’ll grab another cup of coffee, even if I unplug the machine and pour the pot out in the sink. He asks the same questions, no matter what I say in return.
Is it the house that’s caught in a loop, or him? If it was the house, wouldn’t it have caught me, too?
So how come I can leave and he’s stuck living through the same day over and over? A Sunday, so he doesn’t realize the office replaced him months ago. A day when it looked like rain later, but he doesn’t see how far that day has left him behind.
Everyone says it’s incurable. Tells me I should just leave him – he wouldn’t notice. Hollow, smiling conversations with the empty space across the table.
But I spent that day with him the first time. A lazy Sunday, takeout and old movies, sitting with our legs tangled together on the couch. The Thai place stopped taking his calls months ago, too, but he’ll never starve. He goes through the motions of eating nothing, and that sustains him.
And after the Thai food and sappy movies, which he must have chosen just to set the mood, he slid off the couch, down to one knee in front of me. Smiling, takeout boxes stacked on the table behind him and TV static burning his silhouette permanently into the world.
I haven’t missed that moment yet. I can’t. No matter what I say, he’s so happy every time – my ‘yes’ is already burned into the world.
So maybe this is life together. Maybe, someday, the loop will catch me, too. I hope so. It would be easier that way – everyone else could move on, and we wouldn’t even notice, eating Thai food and tangling ourselves together for good on the day when I said I would spend the rest of my life with him.