Thursday, March 16, 2006
Angle of Repose
by venitha
In three short days, the cold water shocks of home (the enormity of our master bathroom, the speed of our washing machine, the decadence of a dishwasher) now wash over me in waves of familiar comfort (the short walk with Maggie to the mailbox, the recognizable voices of NPR while I shower, the easy camaraderie of a family dinner).
I keep mentally pinching myself, hard, both to connect my mind with reality and to prevent myself from being lulled into such a state of detached contentment that it's impossible to leave.
We are currently scheduled to depart for Singapore Saturday morning, but like Maggie near the end of a walk, I am dragging my feet. Even Jim thinks I should extend my stay for another week, to enjoy having come up for air in this angle of repose. The easy willingness on both of our parts to do this is ironically alarming; such a separation is what I've viewed for the last nine months as the ultimate failure: my abandoning Jim in Singapore. And it's abandoning him with a casual shrug and a half-hearted whimper after nine months of Herculean effort and hard-won success.
But I pinch myself, hard, and I know that in reality Jim will be in Taiwan next week, so my staying in Colorado is merely saving him from committing the crime of "abandoning" me in Singapore for, oh, the dozenth time, but still. Something feels very very wrong when I think of taking Jim to the Denver airport and sending him back to Asia alone.
To preserve some semblance of my good wife illusion, I nagged my still-coughing-horribly husband into making a doctor's appointment to get the assurance that he doesn't have pneumonia or tuberculosis or worse. Both the doctor and the x-rays claim he's fine, though he still sounds awful. Maggie Maggie Quite Contrary, on the other hand, acted like a puppy today but has been given a blood work death sentence.
venitha
I keep mentally pinching myself, hard, both to connect my mind with reality and to prevent myself from being lulled into such a state of detached contentment that it's impossible to leave.
We are currently scheduled to depart for Singapore Saturday morning, but like Maggie near the end of a walk, I am dragging my feet. Even Jim thinks I should extend my stay for another week, to enjoy having come up for air in this angle of repose. The easy willingness on both of our parts to do this is ironically alarming; such a separation is what I've viewed for the last nine months as the ultimate failure: my abandoning Jim in Singapore. And it's abandoning him with a casual shrug and a half-hearted whimper after nine months of Herculean effort and hard-won success.
But I pinch myself, hard, and I know that in reality Jim will be in Taiwan next week, so my staying in Colorado is merely saving him from committing the crime of "abandoning" me in Singapore for, oh, the dozenth time, but still. Something feels very very wrong when I think of taking Jim to the Denver airport and sending him back to Asia alone.
To preserve some semblance of my good wife illusion, I nagged my still-coughing-horribly husband into making a doctor's appointment to get the assurance that he doesn't have pneumonia or tuberculosis or worse. Both the doctor and the x-rays claim he's fine, though he still sounds awful. Maggie Maggie Quite Contrary, on the other hand, acted like a puppy today but has been given a blood work death sentence.
venitha
