He had also lost a wife, not to death but to another man. He had returned from an afternoon at the library to find a note covering the ‘SHALOM!’ of their home’s welcome mat: “I had to do it for myself.”
No one said anything as he read the note, and no one ever said anything afterward, as if the disappearance of his wife weren’t the slightest bit unusual, or as if they hadn’t noticed that he had been married at all.
Why couldn’t she have slid it under the door? he wondered. Why couldn’t she have folded it? It looked just like any other note she would leave him, like, “Could you try to fix the broken knocker?” or ”I’ll be back soon, don’t worry.” It was so strange to him that such a different kind of note - ”I had to do it for myself.” - could look exactly the same: trivial, mundane, nothing.
He could have hated her for leaving it there in plain sight, he could have hated her for the plainness of it, a message without adornment, without any small clue to indicate that yes, this is important, yes, this is the most painful note I’ve ever written, yes, I would sooner die than to have to write this again. Where were the dried teardrops? Where was the tremor in the script?
But his wife was his first and only love and it was the nature of those from the tiny shtetl to forgive their first and only loves, so he forced himself to understand, or to pretend to understand. He never once blamed her… she wanted to be without him.
Posted on May 23rd (6:02pm), 5 days ago
