TILL DEATH DO US PART | JENLISA

SEVEN

JENNIE

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Shows of Conviction

April 20, 2011

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It’s been a week. I wait for her just as I promised, giving her space. I pretend that her absence doesn’t hurt me, that it doesn’t make my brittle heart break. I go through the motions. I sleep, I shower, I go to school. I try not to see her, but she is everywhere. Lisa appears in every hallway during passing period and drifts past every classroom’s open door when I happen to look up.

It feels like she is haunting me.

The beautiful things she always said, the things we shared together, the fact that she just made me want to forget the world and exist, those moments hang in my mind and taunt me when she materializes in my view. She is so close and yet so very far. Out of my hands and out of my life like she never existed in my arms at all. I tell myself she didn’t, that she hasn’t. Those moments of realization could kill me if I wasn’t already dead once from the loss of her. God, what I would do to have her here, the woman who knows me and loves me.

I would give anything for it, but all I have is hope that my wife is somewhere inside the brooding young woman that avoids me, and time. So like I said, I go through the motions. I go to practice, I eat vacant dinners that taste like familial hate, and sleep again. I fill my moments with anything that isn’t her face and smile. I distract myself by running, exploring trails I have never gone down before, because in my other life I wasn’t me. I go as deep into wooded areas as I can, trading the mid-spring blister of sunlight for mottled shadows. I find streams I’ve never seen, cross them on slick rocks, testing my new body. My legs do as I command, pushing me faster than I’ve ever run before. I marvel at the precision of my smooth motions. Of how when I jump, I have no fear of landing, not in the physical regard, anyway. While I focus on the physical, it’s those movements that push me far from home, into wide open spaces under a deep blue sky.

The internal parts are a whole other story.

I scream as I run, releasing my burgeoning insecurities to the vacant wide open landscapes. It isn’t until now I learn that I never allowed myself just to be. I was always so strung, so tense, focused on the next objective, the next conquest. Now, when I pass vacant farm houses and broken down mills, I let everything go. I have nothing, no goal, no missive, just the slow drag of life as the days march past and I wait.

And during that time, along these runs, I do something I’ve never done before. I work on me.

I compel myself to be authentic, let myself be me, the one I never let exist. The woman that gives a shit about people, that cares about the walls I have boxed around my heart. I didn’t realize until now that I want them gone. And it isn’t just the ones between Lisa and me, it’s all of them. Those personal epiphanies litter long washes of dirt trails and hang on river willows I push through. My realizations are for me and the crickets in the cool spring evenings, for the broken windows and boarded up buildings. They are for the universe because I’m trying to take advantage of the gift it has given me.

And God?

I run all the way to the monolithic cross by the highway outside Effingham. It’s easily fifteen miles away, but I make it out here every Sunday after church. After I’ve sat beside abusive parents and listened to them pray, I need to make a communion of my own. I come here because I want to remember that real religion isn’t about the words that pour from hypocritical lips. It is about what’s between me and Him, our private words when no one is watching. Lisa taught me that. She also taught me, indirectly, that religion is a lot like love in that way. The meaningful parts happen out of view. The real things happen when no one is watching.