14. Daniel
Daniel
"Learning to Be Alone"
The hiking group was Jonah's idea. He'd been part of it for two years — a loose collection of people who went out on weekend mornings to walk trails in the Forest Preserves, the kind of low-commitment social structure that works because the activity takes the pressure off the interaction.
"You don't have to talk," he said. "You can just walk. It's good."
What he meant was: you have no friends, Daniel, other than work colleagues and your brother, and it's time to notice that.
He was right. I had spent twelve years socializing through Maya — she was the one who maintained the friendships, organized the dinners, remembered the birthdays.
Our couple friends were mostly people she'd chosen or kept or tended to.
The men I talked to at work I could describe by their professional roles and softball stats and not much else.
My college roommate and I exchanged birthday texts and nothing else. I had Jonah.
I had spent twelve years outsourcing my social life to my wife the same way I'd outsourced my domestic life, and I was starting to understand that this was not an accident or an inevitability but a pattern. A long, comfortable pattern of letting Maya carry what I should have been carrying myself.
The first Saturday with the hiking group was genuinely uncomfortable.
There were twelve people, ages ranging from probably late twenties to late sixties, and everyone seemed to know everyone, and the trail through Waterfall Glen was beautiful and I had nothing to say to anyone.
I walked in the middle of the group and answered the questions people asked me — my name, what I did for work, whether I'd done this trail before — with competent but minimal answers and felt, for the first time in many years, the specific discomfort of a situation I did not know how to navigate.
I went back the next Saturday.
It was slightly less uncomfortable. The woman at the front of the group, a high school teacher named Angie who seemed to know every tree by its scientific name and was genuinely thrilled about this, told me a story about a bluebird she'd spotted on this trail two weeks ago and I found myself interested, actually interested, in a way I hadn't expected.
I asked her how she knew it was a bluebird specifically and not a different blue bird and she looked at me with the expression of a teacher encountering a student who has just asked the right question and spent the next fifteen minutes explaining it.
I came home from that second Saturday with mud on my boots and a recommendation for a field guide and something that might, if I was careful with it, become an acquaintance.
I also called my mother that night. About the pot roast recipe.
I'm not sure why — it had been years since I'd made it, decades since I'd watched her make it, and I'd been thinking about it all week for no particular reason I could identify.
She answered on the second ring, voice slightly surprised to be hearing from me on a random Saturday evening, and I asked her to walk me through the recipe, and she cried a little in the middle of explaining the herb rub.
"Mom?" I said. "Are you —"
"I'm fine," she said, doing that thing where you laugh a little through it. "It's just been a while since you called to talk. I was happy for a minute. Don't make something of it."
I made the pot roast on Sunday. I ate it alone. But I ate all of it.
I have been thinking, since my session with Dr. Cross, about what I outsourced to Maya.
Not the domestic things — I could see those clearly now, was in fact confronting them directly every time I tried to locate something in my own house and found I didn't know where it was kept, or tried to make an appointment I'd always depended on her to schedule.
Those were obvious. Those I could name and address.
What I'm thinking about now is the emotional outsourcing.
The way I had handed her the responsibility of being the feeling person in our marriage — the one who tracked the relational temperature, who noticed when we'd been too isolated, who suggested dinner with friends or a weekend away, who sensed when something needed to be addressed and either addressed it or absorbed the weight of it going unaddressed.
I had lived for twelve years as the practical half of a marriage and let her be the emotional half and called this a balanced arrangement.
It was not balanced. It was a division of labor in which she carried the heavier load and I paid the bills.
I sit with this understanding late at night in the kitchen, with a cup of tea I've started making because Maya always made tea when she couldn't sleep and I am living in the space her absence has revealed, trying to learn the shape of what she was.
I write her a second letter. This one I finish and seal and hold for a few days.
Then, on a Thursday night, I address it to her apartment.
The address I found from a check she sent me for her half of a shared expense — she'd been careful about the finances, Maya, careful about maintaining her own standing and not depending on mine for the basics, and even in that small practicality I can see something I should have seen years ago: she had been protecting herself, quietly, for a long time.
I put the letter in the mailbox on the corner. I walk home in the cold.
It is, I realize, the first real thing I've sent in months of trying to figure out what the real thing is.