Page 100 of Where the Snakes Sleep

Henri does not manipulate me simply because he knows how easily affection disarms me.

At least, I do not think he does.

God, what a strange sentence to write about someone I know better than anyone alive.

Maybe that is why I bought this.

Perhaps I only need somewhere to preserve my own version of events before Henri explains them to me so persuasively that I forget what bothered me in the first place.

That sounds worse.

I keep doing that.

Writing a sentence, reading it back, realizing it contains an accusation I did not know I intended to make.

Maybe tomorrow I will tear these pages out.

Maybe this entire exercise is self-indulgent nonsense.

But tonight I am at the cottage alone because Henri said he needed the house quiet for meetings. He did not tell me with whom, even when I asked.

And now I am sitting at my kitchen table, listening to rain against the windows of a house I once bought because I wanted somewhere that belonged to me rather than to Henri, writing in a book like a lonely teenager and wondering when exactly I began needing permission to remain in the place where we built our life.

Tomorrow I will go back.

He will probably kiss me when I arrive.

I will ask how the meeting went. He will say fine. I will ask who attended. Perhaps he will tell me. Perhaps I will decide it does not matter.

I want us to be how we were before.

I keep thinking there must be some combination of patience and affection capable of carrying us backward, as though a relationship is a path one can simply retrace if one remembers where the wrong turn occurred.

I do not know where ours was.

Maybe there was no wrong turn.

Maybe I am only frightened because I can feel Henri moving somewhere I cannot follow, and I have spent so much of my life following him that I no longer know what it means to be left behind.

That is enough for tonight.

If nothing else, I suppose I have discovered why people keep journals.

Sometimes you need one place where no one can interrupt you before you understand what you were trying to say.

* * *

24 February 1996

I have decided that melancholy is useless if one does nothing with it.

This is the conclusion I reached after rereading my first entry and realizing I sounded like a widower mourning a man who is, in fact, alive, sleeping beside me most nights, and still irritating me with extraordinary consistency.

Henri has not vanished.

We have not ended.

Nothing catastrophic has occurred.