12. All whistles and bangs.

I met a friend for a hot chocolate. We had other things to chat about, but then came the “how are you doing?”.

We talked about the ‘ we’re being nice’. How I still get to come home to a cooked meal – he still does much more of the cooking, possibly more so lately. If it’s out of guilt I don’t care, Because left to my own devices at the moment I’d don’t think I’d bother. I’ve stopped eating breakfast, really not much appetite. I can forgo lunch if no one at work suggests going to the cafe. I’m not starving myself, just really not interested. But I’ll eat with others and I’ll eat whats cooked for me.

It’s all still pleasant. There are silences, but they’re not too heavy, yet. There also seems to be a ceasing of hostilities between current husband and daughter, although she’s out such a lot it is hard to tell.

My friend and I talked about what means good in a relationship. I like good, I don’t even mind ok much of the time. I had ‘all consuming’ once. All whistles and bangs, not able to keep our hands off each other, not sure where the passion stopped and the rage began. The balance between the amazing sex and the fist in the wall by my head was a precarious one. That wasn’t good. And once I’d left, had some space, and healed,  I knew that I could never grow in that life. Nothing can. I didn’t want that, and I knew, have always known, that I wouldn’t go there again. Feeling safe, supported, left to be myself, is the route – should it be root? – that I sought.

The H (I really have to find a term) had one of those moth to a flame type loves. Five years of destruction that they kept going back to. I know she still appears in his dreams sometimes. (Will I, when we’re done?) Their rock and roll lifestyle (no music included) left him bruised and confused. But, in that land of passion, obsession, fixation, where nothing healthy appeared to flourish, was the foundation of what is expected of a relationship set in stone for him?

You’d have thought that these are the things we should know by now. But who picks apart the workings of a marriage when they’re in it. There didn’t seem a point at which to analyse everything, and nothing ever seemed so bad that I knew we were doomed. But may be  my choice to be somewhere in the middle, not on the edges where the ‘all consuming’ extreme lives is only enough for me. H may need the crazy times to feel that it all means something. I know I don’t. They don’t mean you love more, they just mean you’re loud about it. I have a loud laugh, that’ll be enough for me.