231 - Two Hundred Thirty One

Breaker Whiskey

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[TRANSCRIPT]

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I keep replaying our fight in my head. The one that marked the beginning of the end.

It’s weird, I remember so many things she said with perfect clarity. “Do you have any idea what kind of torture it’s been sharing a space with you all this time?” She shouted that at me. Harry so rarely shouts—the fact that she was raising her voice for so much of the conversation was almost as jarring as what she was saying.

Torture. Here I thought we’d been living in relative peace and every day was torture for her. Torture she thought she deserved. Torture that, since that fight, I’ve sometimes thought she deserved.

Except it wasn’t just her being drawn and quartered, was it? In denying herself something she thought she didn’t deserve, she put me through the wringer too.

That’s how the argument started. I finally just…snapped. There’s only so much one woman can take, you know? And the signals I got from Harry had always been mixed, but that night…I was sitting by the fire, Harry was in her studio, as she so often was and I was…honestly, I don’t even remember what I was doing. I’d fixed yet another leak in the roof that day, the house had really been starting to fall apart and there was only so much I could do and—

That’s the thing, we fought earlier that day. I came in from outside and it was—it was a fucking cold day, you know one of those February days where it feels like winter is never going to end and my hands were frozen solid and when I came into the kitchen, I was—I was rubbing them together, trying to get them to warm up and Harry had already put the kettle on and she came over and—and she stepped right up to me and put her hands around mine. And we stood there, barely a breath apart, her body heat sinking into mine, my eyes still watering from the cold air outside.

There were so many of those little moments—moments when she’d look at me and I’d think…here it is. Finally. After years of holding my breath, the exhale is finally coming.

But then she stepped back. She started fixing me tea and it felt like I was going to suffocate, from holding the air in for too long and we’d—well, she’d agreed to go out more the last few years. To that picnic, on small hikes, supply runs that were a little more far flung and so I—I tried to get some relief, from all of it, from the cold and the breathlessness and so I said something about going somewhere warm. A vacation. I suggested we go on a fucking vacation.

And of course it turned into the fight that we always had when I made that suggestion—how we were safe where we were, how we didn’t know what else was out there and I—well, I think I did tell you about this particular fight once, maybe, because for a long time it was the only part of that day I could allow myself to think about—but I—I told her that we were never going to move forward if we didn’t literally move forward, that we wouldn’t have a future together if we kept standing still and that was the first time either of us had ever spoken anything like that out loud and she just said “we don’t have a future either way” and that…that was that.

(laugh) What fucking irony, huh? Both of us arguing about the future when we were in one of our own making.

Did you know, Harry? Did you know that things weren’t safe out here? Did you know where we were all along?

If I find out that you—I mean, I’m already having a hard enough time forgiving you for—there are some things that I’ll never get over, Harry.

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