A few days ago, a friend had come over to my house to meet my kitten. It has happened a number of times that a friend has dropped by, and I’ve apologized and excused myself repeatedly about how messy the house is. I’d like to blame my husband for the mess, and truly, much of the mess is his. His clothes move around from room to room, as if he never can quite believe that he’s going to be staying here for long. One or the other of us, inevitably, will decide that he and his clothes should go stay somewhere else for a while. He tends to sink into dark, depressive holes, and he’ll leave dishes and such around. I’ll come home from work and refuse to clean up after him, and after a while, everything is just a wreck.

While I do like blaming him, I must admit that it’s easy for me to give up. When his dishes are everywhere, it gets easier and easier to leave my dishes around with him. I’ll pile my clothes on the floor, too, since it seems silly to put them away. I’ll trip over his things while trying to put them away. We end up living in a disaster zone, tripping over each other and resenting our mutual messes.

When my friend came in most recently, I realized something I hadn’t noticed. There’s a Christmas wreath still hanging on my wall. It’s June, my friends, and I have a Christmas wreath. I don’t know why. Our home was never in any kind of condition to be decorating for holidays, but somehow, this one wreath made its way onto the wall, and it hasn’t yet made it’s way down. I looked at it, and realized, “Oh. That’s right. Our lives are unmanageable.”

This afternoon, my husband was saying he’d like to have a drink. I said that I thought I might like to have a drink as well. We bandied around the idea of buying margarita mix or a bottle of wine or a bottle of Bourbon or something liquid, bottled, and mood-altering. We thought we might drink it all, take off our clothes, and roll around the bed for a while. We agreed it didn’t seem so bad, as long as we did this stuff together. He quickly suggested that we get some black tar heroin, spike it with cocaine, and shoot it up together, and I realized I’d gone off into a crazy fantasyland with him. Sometimes, I wonder how he hasn’t convinced me to start funding a joint heroin addiciton yet. This man can talk me off a cliff, and I’ll follow.

I’m spending a lot of time with him, lately, and I get so foggy when we are close. Some of what he says starts to make sense. I like it when what he says makes sense. I love him. Sometimes, he just grabs me, so rough and so tight and so sure…and I know it’s where I belong. It’s where I want to be, in his arms, forever, no matter what. I don’t know, though, if it’s going to last. I don’t know when it will all come unglued again. Today, though, I’m ignoring that possibility, folding myself into his embrace, and hoping for the best. It’s a one day at a time program, right?