Dear Husband,

"Here's what I think, Mr. Wind-Up Bird," said May Kasahara. "Everybody's born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up. What I'd really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person. But I can't seem to do it. They just don't get it. Of course, the problem could be that I'm not explaining it very well, but I think it's because they're not listening very well. They pretend to be listening, but they're not, really. So I get worked up sometimes, and I do some crazy things."

-Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

It makes me very sad that I'm feeling compelled to write letters to you again. When I'm wanting to write to you, it means that I'm feeling like it's impossible to find you, like you're lost to me. I see you there. I see your body. I see your face. I see your eyes, hurting. But I can't see you, and I'm sure you can't see me. I see someone who is hurting me. You see someone who is hurting you. We don't see each other, and it makes it worse.

I don't know how to move past this part, but I hope that we can. More than anything, I want our marriage. I want it in my guts. I want it all over me on the outside and all the way down in the deepest most inside part of me. I want our life together to work, and I spend every day in fear that I'm losing you.

After talking to each other this morning, I left the house and started thinking about all the things we said and how much we keep hurting each other. I don't want to hurt you, and I don't think you want to hurt me, but we can't seem to stop. It's like our words leave our mouths and change, and what we meant to say falls away before it reaches the other. All that's left is a cold, hard thing, sharp-edged. It's all pain, fear, shame, guilt. It's awful, and it has to stop.

I wonder what is the other option, and I wonder how we'll find it. There has to be another way. There must be a way to make this relationship possible. I love you. You love me. We're both hurting, and we're both feeling alone. It doesn't make sense that we should feel this way when we spend every day and night together. It doesn't make sense to hurt separately when we could drop the walls and fall into each other's arms.

What if we both stopped considering separation as a possibility? What if we decided, together, that it's not possible not to be together, and it's not possible to keep doing this anymore. What if we decided that from this day forward, we were going to give this relationship everything we've got...that we were both going to make sure that each day, we both did our very best to regard one another with loving kindness, compassion, and the deep affection that keeps us tied together in spite of all the pain we've experienced? I am willing to try.

I love you, and I'm sorry for my part in all of this.

Your Wife.

Dear Husband,

I still taste his kisses
like candy in my mouth.

-"Lonesome Blues" by the Be Good Tanyas

I am angry at myself for letting me relapse on you. I'm detoxing, again. I can't stop thinking about your mouth.

Today, I want to give up and tell you to come home. I want to tell you that I'll do whatever it takes not to have to lose proximity to your mouth.

At the meeting I went to last night, the topic was denial. I used to think of denial as that thing I felt in the face of your using, where I'd not even let myself admit the possibility that it could be happening. Today, my denial is different. I'm in denial that my life might be better without you.

I have a good life. I have good friends. I have a connection to my God. I have cool pets. I have a great job that I enjoy, and I'm making enough money to pay the bills by myself. I help a lot of people. I'm healthy. I'm attractive. I'm smart. When I take an inventory of my life without you in it, it's wonderful, or it should be wonderful...but I don't feel it. All I feel is the pain in my guts for wanting you.

And I'd trade it all. I'd give up everything if it could bring you back to me. I'd give up the sanity I've found in my efforts to compensate for your madness if I could find a way to live with you. I'd be ugly and stupid and broke and never, ever write another word if it would make us so we could live together. I wish I could just let it all go, and I know I can't.

I'm spending the rest of the day not calling you. I don't know what I want to say, but I want to call you. I know from experience that when I most want to call you, I most shouldn't. Nothing good will come of it, and if you hear my deep longing for you in my voice, you'll use it to hurt me.

I don't know what to do with myself. I miss you, and I love you from the deepest place inside me.

Your Wife.

Dear Husband,

I've spent much of today thinking about your mouth: your lips, your teeth, your tongue. I've spent too much time on it.

Sometimes, I'm overcome by my physical desire for you, as if I've been traumatized by it. It's kind of like the feeling after being in a car crash...you're walking down the street, just living your normal life, and suddenly, you hear the cracking glass, the screeching tires. I'm living my life, teaching and writing and thinking and breathing, and all of a sudden, all I can see is your face. All I can see is your mouth. I feel paralyzed by it, and thrilled, and afraid.

My life has been fogged, like a mirror, by your breath. I wipe a little window to see through, and then I invite you back to heat the space all up again.

I'm still, oddly, enjoying this time alone. I am feeling much better about it after seeing you a few days ago and reading your sweet, sweet letter, but even if I am not comfortable with you out of my life, I am comfortable with you out of my house. I am proud of myself for coming to a place where I can recognize my need for separation from you.

I hope you are healing. I know that there's not likely to be much more time before you are going to want to come home, and I'm afraid of it. We aren't ready to live together. I won't tell you no. My fear is that we will continue to come together and separate, come together and separate, until I finally reach a point where I break.

Or that I won't ever reach that point.

I love you.

Your Wife.

Dear Husband,

Talking to you is hard. It's hard and it's wonderful. It's wonderful and it's terrible.

Honestly, I've had a better day today, though, for knowing that you're missing me. It's sick. A lot of people, mostly people who don't know you and who don't know me, are telling me I'm a fool for even entertaining the possibility of having a future with you. They're all absolutely right. I'm a fool. I've always been a fool for you, and I don't see it ending any time soon.

I like the idea of living apart and seeing each other sometimes, of taking some space to heal separately but with an understood intention of coming back together. I feel like I can catch my breath. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but it's a true thing.

I meditated with my new guru today, and somewhere along the way, I recognized that I was sitting quietly without thinking of you. It felt like a victory to be able to sit quietly and not think of you, but letting my mind go to celebrate that victory turned it back on, and sent it spiraling after you. Before I was able to get back to myself, I found my hands wandering through your hair, holding still at the place where your hair meets your neck. I found my eyes picking through its color, the dark singed with gold; my mouth pressing close, breathing deep. My mind finds its way to you always, but I'm working on it.

I love you. No more, no less. I love you like I've always loved you. I feel differently about you, but the love is just the same as it ever was. It's never grown. It's never shrunk. It sinks me in myself like an anchor. I guess that's marriage, really: a love that never changes.

It bears out to the edge of doom. We stand together on the edge. I know you'll leap, and I won't let go of your hand.

Your Wife.

Dear Husband,

I'm having another hard day.

I spoke with your mother today. She told me some stuff it was difficult to hear, but I'm not surprised. I can always tell when you turn into a different person...when the lies start. When you stop making sense. When you're so angry. When you can't finish anything you start. I always know, and I don't want to know, and I believe myself and don't at the same time.

I want the ache in my heart to go away, forever. I want the space next to me in my bed filled with you, but I want that other you. Maybe I want an imaginary you.

I want to understand my own ups and downs in grieving, but I guess it's not a thing that's logical or understandable in that way. I had such a good day yesterday, without falling apart at all...and then today, I've had much more bad time. For several days in a row, I felt like it was getting easier every day, but today is not easier than yesterday. Because of the particular ways I'm mad, I start to imagine that this is how it's going to be: a long, painful decline.

I'm taking good care of myself, though, and doing all the work I know I need to do to get through this stuff...I went to my yoga, and I've talked to my friends and family. I'm reading my books, going to my meetings, and working my steps. I am recognizing a tenacity in healing myself that makes me very proud of who I've become. I wish you could be proud of me, too. I wish, more than anything, to share this growth with you. I want you to be a part of the journey, and you're not.

I wonder what kinds of things you're thinking about. I wonder how deeply committed you are to sabotaging this relationship. I'm so afraid that you're going to do something stupid and irreparable. I'm afraid that you will do something stupid and irreparable, and I'll accept you anyway. I'm afraid that there's no good outcome.

I do want off the roller coaster, but I want you just as much. I'm very angry that it doesn't seem possible for me to have both.

I'm angry at your madness. I'm angry at myself for battering me against your madness, trying to make sense of it. I'm angry at your disease for making you think it's ok to treat me badly. I'm angry that you expect me to exude endless sympathy, endless money, endless love and support and nurturing because you're sick (because you're using). I'm angry that you think abstinence from heroin is the end of the problems you've created. I'm angry that the sudden, sharp personality changes I watched happen in you are all related to drugs, drugs, drugs. I'm so fucking sick of drugs. I'm sick of being sad. I'm sick of being sorry. I'm sick of being mad, lonely, afraid...I'm sick of it all.

I am shocked that there is such a profound part of me that is thinking it might be worth it just to go to you and ask you to come home, regardless of the cost. There's a part of me that thinks I'll put up with anything, always, just to keep you close to me.

I think I'm sicker than you are.

I love you.

Your Wife

Dear Husband,

Today has been a little better. I am feeling ok. A friend of mine from Nar-Anon has been struggling with her relationship, and we spent a lot of time together this evening. It was good to be able to get my mind off of you, us, me...

I think it's the first day in the longest time that I haven't fallen apart completely. I'm surprised. I still feel a deep, deep empty in the pit of myself, but I'm able to keep moving and overlooking it.

I am still talking about you, though, and thinking about you, and thinking about your problems as mine and my problems as yours, and our problems as the problems of a married couple. I'm not treating it as if we are moving toward becoming something different. I'm not feeling less married. Maybe it's too soon. You haven't even been gone a week.

I hosted a chat session at The Second Road tonight, and it was fun in a lot of ways, but in other ways, it was hard. I talked about you, and I talked about how things were before you came unglued. I am having trouble getting my mind out of that time. It was such good time.

More than anything in the world, more than anything ever, I want it back. I want you back, whole and healthy. I want the life we almost had.

That's the story of us, isn't it? The almost perfect, almost complete. It's infuriating, as I keep doing my part. I keep finishing the plan, but it doesn't work when it's only me. We make these stories for our shared future together, and I wish you'd find a way to make your part true, or achievable. I know it's not in your power when you're in your disease, though...you'd never say, "I'm going to be a heroin junky and be unemployed and parasitic and miserable for a couple of years!" Neither of us would have composed the story just this way...but I can't stop imagining the differences between what is and what could have been.

I miss you so much. I've been missing you for a long time now, though, and I know that having you back home won't bring You to me, the part of You that I recognized the first time I saw You, when it felt like the sun had finally come up in my life. You've got what's best in you all vaulted up, and no matter what I do, I can't get at that man. Even knowing it, though, I crave your physical presence. I want to see your face, smell you skin, taste you neck. My eyes are hungry and my hands hurt from being emptied of you.

I love you. I always will.

You Wife.

Dear Husband,

It's getting a little better every day, but still, at least for a few minutes each day, I feel like I can't breathe.

Today, for instance, there have been two times where I've lost my breath. The first was this morning. I went out with some friends for breakfast, and there is a duck pond by the restaurant where we ate. I was doing ok. These are friends in recovery, so it felt good to be among my people while I'm feeling so raw inside, and I felt as centered as I've felt since you left. But I stopped for a few minutes when I left to look at the geese and the beautiful, black swans, and it seemed like my heart might break. They were beautiful. You are beautiful. Beauty hurts my eyes now. I don't want to see beautiful things because I can't see my most beautiful thing.

And then there was a song. I'm at a coffee shop, and I'm trying to work. I haven't been able to get anything done all week, and I committed to myself that today, I'd get caught back up. I can't get financially behind, and I can't let my work pile up until it becomes an avalanche. I had great intentions of catching it all back up today and tomorrow, so I left the house (which honestly is feeling a bit haunted in your absence). I was working along pretty well, and then I hear that song by Amos Lee that you liked a few years ago called "Colors." Remember that song?

I know we all,
we all got our faults.
We get locked in our vaults,
and we stay..

When you're gone,
all the colors fade.
When you're gone,
no new years day parade.
You're gone,
colors seem to fade,
colors seem to fade.

I thought it was so charming how you liked that stupid, sappy song. Now, it reminds me of you walking around our first apartment together, singing. It reminds me of you grabbing me and throwing me down on the bed. It reminds me of the joy I found with you, the pure, sweet joy that we had before it got so ugly. God, remember the first day we were in that apartment together? Remember looking around and realizing it was going to be us, ours? Together!

I've also been pretty mad at you today, or at least mad at your disease. I've been hurting too much to be mad, so I'm hoping that getting angry will be progress. I woke up this morning with the word "parasite" in my mouth, and I had to say it out loud. It was beating its wings, and it needed to fly. You see, it makes me really, really angry that you're starting to be able to make a little money on your own, and that at the same time I'm getting good at enforcing my boundaries. What it feels like is that you've been sucking the life out of me, and as soon as I start to tell you, "No," and you start to be able to take care of yourself, you're casting me off. I don't like the idea that I've been a free house near the methadone clinic for you. I don't want to have been your host body.

But it is whatever it is, and I'm powerless over it. I kept going and going and going until the waters were rising up above my head, and I had to make a move. You're moving, and I'm moving. Maybe we'll move back together one day.

But today, what I want is the hooks you have in my heart to let me go. I want 24 straight hours of being able to breathe without feeling these panicked snakes crawling up my throat. God, I love you, and I hope you're ok. I hope we both are.

Love, love, love,

Your wife.