Point of Origin Pt. 3

I sat on the end of the love seat, staring at the floor. Allison was on the sofa, the TV was on. Something pedestrian playing as I gathered the thoughts and the courage to express them. It had been months since we last talked. Really talked. We did try but they weren't really talks. They were contests, sometimes. Other times they were just me talking to the room and Allison trying not to be there. She had already conceded the battle or perhaps, didn't know there was to be a battle.

"Hey, Allison. I think maybe we need a divorce." I remember saying the words. I remember how awful they sounded, weak and hurtful at the same time. In the air they took on life and it was done. I could not bring them back.

"I know." she said.

And that was it. It was over. She knew. I later learned she had known for a long time. The passionate woman I had married a year before had been left in California, where we had married. It wasn't as if she did not try. She did. And she managed to keep her humor most of the time. It was hard for her. She had been 4 years clean and sober when I met her. She had networked with other addicts she had known her entire life. She lived in the same town as her family, her mother, her aunts, her sister and brother. I took her to this strange, redneck place. Just she and little Suzie. The rest was all my family and friends. So few of us addicts, she had no common footing anywhere. And yet she was going to stick it out, even if that meant doing so on the sofa.

I had met her two years before, after a string of those awful relationships one can get. The closeted lesbian, the friend with benefits, the love that doesn't return. It had been so long since I had been with anyone that I was actually in love with, that when I met Allison and her comfortable manner and her gentle spirit, I managed to convince myself that this tremendous friendship and painless daily existence must be the definition of mature love. I began to believe that the heart pounding, confused and messy on-going disasters that I had come to know as love, were simply a childhood thing. Adults, I thought at 26 years of age, are not subject to that explosive passion. So, we married. Then we moved back to my southern Oregon.

And a year later she is laying on the sofa across from me. I was trying to think of what I would tell Suzie. Her paternal father was just slightly better than homeless and subject to intense delusions. I had been the most stable male in her life and more importantly, I loved Suzie. I was helpless for it. She was my daughter. Now I was going to break her trust and her heart. Son of a bitch! My hands shook. She was eight years old and she could kill me just by being sad. I cannot remember how I spoke to her. I remember Allison was there. We talked about it together. I remember Suzie closing up. They were gone a week later, back home with grandma.

The next few years found me on the road quite often. 16 hour round trips from Grants Pass to Healdsburg, California to pick up Suzie and bring her home for a few weeks during summer or Christmas vacation. In 1999 Suzie moved in with Tati and I and shared our house for a couple years. Allison died when Suzie was 15 years old. Allsion suffered from extreme epilepsy and had apparently suffocated during a seizure, which she had endured almost nightly. Suzie had found her the next morning. She cursed God for it. She is married to a wonderful and gentle man, living in Canada, but planning to move back soon. She can still kill me by crying.