I hate keeping secrets. Like my job, I am generally very good at doing it but sometimes it makes me want to tear my hair out and/or crawl in a hole and hide. When things are trapped in your head and you can’t let them out, you can feel horribly, desperately alone. This is why PostSecret is such a huge success. Send in your secret and breathe a sigh of relief. There. You got it out. The world knows the secret and since you have shared and others have shared their secrets with you, you’re not alone.

Do you ever find yourself in a situation that you can only discuss a problem with one particular person? Maybe your other friends will judge, maybe they won’t understand, maybe they’re not close enough friends or are too close to someone else involved. Maybe you can tell some, even most of the story to other friends but you have to keep some parts secret. But the whole thing, unedited?

What if you can’t fit it on a postcard, or anonymous mail-in confessions aren’t your thing? Then you need that someone, that very specific friend.

That person is detached enough from the situation to be able to help you keep perspective. That person is close enough and trustworthy enough that you can tell the whole thing and empty out your heart. That person will let you be upset and hurt and cranky and not try to make everything better. Because that person knows he can’t make everything better – he can just hold you for awhile and hand you kleenex when you’re teary and pillows to punch when you’re angry. All he can really do is remind you to breathe.

That person is strong enough to catch you and not crumble. He doesn’t try to cheer you up or make you forget about things; he respects that you feel what you feel. He won’t belittle your worries or your fears. He won’t force you to be happy, but he’ll offer to share his happiness with you, not as a distraction from your troubles but as means of coping. And remember: if you will share and someone will share with you, you’re not alone.

But it can be hard to remember that you’re not alone when you really are physically alone. Right now, no one can hug me or hand me tissues or even look me in the eye and say it’s okay to be upset. No one is here but me. So I just have to remember that someone shook me out of bed today and said we were going to the zoo, and we saw a lion climb up a tree and an angry ostrich chase a giraffe and a zebra rolling on his back in the dirt.  He didn’t take me there to mean “Don’t worry about your troubles, they’re not important, just look at this instead.” He meant “I know you’ve been feeling weak. I want you to feel good so you feel stronger. Let’s have a beautiful day.”

So even though he’s not here right now and an alone-ish feeling is creeping in around my edges, even though I know he’ll never read this:

Thanks, E. I wouldn’t have made it through these days without you.

Who hears your secrets?

On Tim’s porch, talking about his dad who is still in the hospital more than 2 weeks after open heart surgery and JUST got off the ventilator, about Ben and Mel, about his lack of job, my hate of job, and recently resuscitated relationships.

“Thanks again for coming over. I didn’t really know who else I could talk to. My brothers are all screwed up and worried about my dad, and I’m still mad at my brother and I can’t lean on Ben for anything because he needs to lean on me and there’s just… it just sucks.”

He leans his head on my shoulder and sighs. I put my arm around him and give him a little hug. “It’s okay. I’m here if you need to talk.”

“It means a lot to me that you came. I don’t know what my problem is tonight… like I’m usually dealing with it all okay, but I don’t know… this helps.”

“It happens. You’ve got a lot of stuff piling up right now. But you know I’m here for you.”

Pause for a moment. He lifts his head from my shoulder and turns his face toward mine.

“Your hair smells good.”

“Quit trying to kiss me.”

“But…”

“Uh-uh.”

Well, honestly.

At my psychiatrist’s office, after spending most of my appointment filling her in on stuff with E, with Tim, divorce drama, job-hating, and general angst – I am leaving and realize I’ve forgotten something.

“Doctor?”

“Yes?”

“I forgot to tell you something kind of important.”

“Do you need more of your prescriptions?”

“No, but… that whole not-drinking thing we talked about last time? It’s not working so well. I mean, I’m not getting rip-roaring drunk anymore, I only have, like, two glasses of wine or two beers, but still, with my medicines…”

She scribbles something on her notepad and waves me out. “Don’t worry about it. You have enough going on.”

Ooookay then. Cheers!

Driving home with E after spending 2 hours at the bar, listening to him ramble on about his various family troubles, his brother out of work and broke, his mom just out of rehab, and doing the best I can to advise him on the mess that is his gene pool.

“I lurve you,” he slurs. He’s had a few.

“I love you too, hon.”

“No, I REALLY love you. I wanna spend the rest of my life with you.”

“That’s nice, babe. We’ll talk about that a little more when you’re sober.”

Hold that thought, E. For like, a year.

I broke down and called Tim the other day. He had to be in the same position I was in and I had become determined that we present a united front to keep this as painless as possible.

“I’m worried about Ben,” I say.

“Well yeah, it’s not like this is easy for him.”

“I know, but he’s been calling me two or three times every day and that just seems a little excessive.”

“Really?” he says incredulously. “That much a day?”

“Uh-huh. Has he been calling you a lot?”

“Yeah but I didn’t think he’d be calling you so much, ‘cause you and Melissa…” He trails off. “I mean, you’re kind of on her side, right?”

“Let’s not get into sides here,” I say quickly. “You and I both want to be there for both of them. Ben’s just going so back and forth, like one minute he calls me and he’s so sad and then he calls again and he’s so hopeful and then he calls AGAIN and he’s all paranoid about something she did or said. Is he like that with you?”

“Well, yeah.”

“Tim, I just don’t know what to tell him anymore. False hope is the worst thing right now, you know? And how do you reassure the guy without making him hopeful?”

“I haven’t been able to figure that out either,” he sighs. “Cause I know Melissa, and you know Melissa, and she doesn’t back down.”

I laugh a little. “She’s a tough cookie. I’d be surprised if she changed her mind.”

“Heh, everyone would. But this building up hope thing, I don’t know. I mean, I don’t want to encourage that either. You and me both know it isn’t gonna happen, but he hasn’t come to grips with it yet.”

We talk for awhile, trying and failing to come up with any strategy other than just listening and trying to talk as little as possible when he calls, just to let him vent. I just want to make sure Tim and I are on the same page, both of us helping Ben in the same direction and not making him any more conflicted than he already is. The guy is understandably confused and sad and generally messed-up right now – who wouldn’t be? He and so many people, Tim included, are still in the stage where they’re asking over and over:

“Why?”

“I think I understand why,” I tell him. “And that’s only because in a small way, I’ve kind of been in her shoes. With my ex-fiance. And I think that’s a hard thing to explain to people. Not a lot of people understood why I left him either. But that’s a long story.”

“Some of the guys think she was cheating on him.”

“Probably because that’s a simple reason. Cheating, abuse, stuff like that, everyone GETS that. It’s just that emotional stuff and the things going on inside that are hard to explain. That’s what I was trying to tell MIL the other day.”

“Wait, when did you see her?”

Melissa’s mother-in-law (MIL) is what my own mother would call “a piece of work.” She’s never been anything but nice to me, but sometimes she’s a bit…off… and I know that’s caused no small amount of tension between her and the family sometimes. She and Mel have butted heads a number of times over so many things, so MIL is obviously in something of a state about this separation thing.

“Last weekend. I was out in the county doing some shopping and I was right by their house so I dropped by to say hi to her and FIL.”

The father-in-law was always closer to Melissa than MIL ever was. He’s the sort of guy who, with all his crass flirting and antics, would be creepy and inappropriate if only he weren’t such a not-creepy guy at heart. You’d try and sue him for sexual harassment if you could only stop thinking it’s all just straight up funny. FIL and Mel were fishing buddies, cigar-smoking buddies. I was kind of sad he wasn’t there when I stopped by, but it ended up that MIL was enough to handle.

“Um, why did you do that?”

“They adopted me into their family same as they adopted you,” I point out. “And circumstances being what they are, I figure I’m not going to be seeing them as much so I wanted to go by and say hello. It seemed like the right thing to do.”

“Okaaay…”

“Anyway, MIL is hung up on the ‘why why why’ thing too and she’s kinda saying the same stuff you guys are.”

“She thinks Melissa cheated on him?”

“YOU don’t think that, do you?”

“No. but I know her better than a lot of the guys do.”

“I don’t think MIL really thinks that deep down. She just got all sarcastic at one point and said things like ‘Oh, of course Ben must have BEAT her or been a TERRIBLE father’ and I told her to calm down because she knew it wasn’t true. But she went on like ‘or Melissa must have had some sort of AFFAIR,’ and when she went off with that I kind of kicked her.”

“You KICKED her?”

“I sort of nudged her foot with mine to get her to shut up. Maybe I nudged a little harder than necessary.” He starts to laugh. “But my point is that those are the answers that are easy, those are the ones people can GET. Like she would rather have Mel break her son’s heart by cheating on him instead of having her recognize an emotional split and leave before it gets godawful.”

“I guess.”

The easy answers would have been the most hurtful. Yeah, she could have cheated on him and smashed his heart into a million pieces. They could have fought like cats and dogs and both left bitter and hateful. It could be so much worse than it really is, but it seems that at the root of it all, it’s the horrible stuff we really understand. You don’t have to be unfaithful or have had an unfaithful partner to understand that cheating can destroy a relationship. You don’t need to be abusive or be abused to see why couples in those situations separate.

Anyone who’s watched COPS or Cheaters can tell you why those people split up. They’re a little nuts to begin with, and then they go batshit crazy on each other on TV and we laugh and say “good riddance” to the cheating/abusive/criminal/generally evil spouse. Then they end up on Judge Judy six months later.

But what happens when the couple in question is neither abusive nor unfaithful, but instead is well-adjusted, college-educated, middle-class, and gainfully employed?

They’ll never be on a tacky TV show. They will eventually share holidays and work together to make a secure future for their son. Ben and Melissa won’t have an acrimonious court battle over child support and who gets the blue dual-recliner couch and the plastic Jesus. They will do this the well-adjusted, college-educated, middle-class, gainfully-employed way. And one day, Ben will accept that it’s over and he will move on. One day, he will stop feeling guilty for thinking he couldn’t give her what she needed. One day, I think he’ll be glad that it took him a long time to understand what happened, because the easy answers would have been more painful.

And then he’ll understand the ‘why,’ but most people never will.

“Why do you only have polish on two and a half toenails?”

I poke my foot further out from the covers and inspect my badly chipped pedicure. “I just haven’t had them done for awhile,” I say, squirming so my other foot sticks out.

“I take that back, five toes’ worth of polish,” he teases as I wiggle all ten toes at him.

“Shuddup,” I say, elbowing him in the ribs. “I’m saving money. That’s thirty dollars including the tip.”

“Toe polishing costs you thirty bucks?!”

“Well, there’s the spa tub and the lotion thing and the calf and foot massage…”

“Oooh, footrub. I guess thirty isn’t too bad. But why don’t you just paint them yourself then?”

“Cause I’m lazy and it’s not flip-flop time anymore. And what’s this sudden interest in the state of my toes?”

“I was just noticing. And you have the polish right there.” He gestures at the bottle of bright pink O.P.I. on my nightstand.

“That’s not the color.”

“It looks just like it.”

“It’s not.”

“Close enough. I’ll even do it for you.”

I can’t help but snort a little. “Right,” I giggle, grabbing the bottle. “Go for it, muscle man.”

“Huh?”

I hand him the pink polish. “You’ll see.”

He tries to twist the cap and it doesn’t budge. He tries again. “What the hell?”

“It’s dried shut.”

“Then why do you even have it?”

“Dunno.”

He sighs and tosses the bottle over my head into the trash can on the other side of the nightstand.

“Honey?”

“Yeah?”

“Can I have thirty bucks?”

It’s funny that it’s October again already. This week last year was when E and I first started dating. I don’t believe the poets and their yammer about springtime, fall and winter are the perfect seasons for falling in love. Spring is rainy and puddly and muddy and great if you want to fall in love with your galoshes or your Shop-Vac. But fall here is gorgeous: blue, blue skies on crisp days and stars out on cool nights. E and I used to make out in the Jeep with the top off and leaves would fall in from the trees around us. The weather was perfect for patios and porches and curling up under blankets. There was Halloween, E in his Superfan costume (way too realistic) and me in my Playboy Bunny outfit. At Thanksgiving there was ping-pong at my parents’ house and my dad trounced E, who then privately informed me that we could never get engaged till he could beat my dad at ping-pong and ask him for my hand. I slapped him with a paddle and told him to start practicing.

Then there was snow, holding each other up on slippery ice patches, and snowball fights that turned into snow wrestling, culminating with E shouting “This is why I love you!” for all to hear as I shoved snow down the front of his coat. There was walking on the shore of Lake Michigan on Christmas Day, taking pictures of the sand formations sculpted by the snowstorm two days before, and sharing earmuffs because we’d only brought one pair. There were Sunday afternoons of football and nights spent under a down comforter.

It was never a fairytale – there were misunderstandings and arguments and hurt, one particular knock-down, drag-out, tear-filled fight the day before Christmas. But there was love.

I’m feeling nostalgic tonight because E and I had one of our perfect fall days today and for a few moments, it really felt like nothing had changed. We stayed in bed till noon, sat on the porch and enjoyed the blue sky for awhile, watched football. We snuggled on the couch and almost fell off together during the ridiculous last two minutes of the Colts game. He held my hand when I drove him to work.

But I took him to work at a different restaurant today. I didn’t have a beer with him while we watched football. He has a different quarterback in fantasy football. My hair is shorter, less highlighted. He’s lost a little weight. Superficial things have changed and while we’re both aware that we can’t start over fresh (because can you ever?), the timing of this reunion of ours just seems very poignant right now. The air is crisp, the leaves are just starting to turn again, and maybe we’re turning too.

Or maybe we’re not. Maybe this will implode again tomorrow. Maybe this is a love that, no matter how good it once was, can’t be salvaged. I’m trying to be realistic, to step back and look at the events, good and bad, of the year that brought us to this point. But the funny thing is that no matter how pragmatic or even cynical I try to be to protect myself, the tiny things keep adding up. It’s football season, the leaves are changing, it’s the first week of October, and we’re back to staring into each other’s eyes and wondering what comes next.

It’s time to learn to trust each other again.