I remember. When he left his first wife, and he needed to go there to retrieve things, she left used condoms around dripping and recently spent to get under his skin, he told me.

I remember. He was half crazy to have been with her, always always always beset with doubt and anxiety. That she was not who she said she was, that in fact she was carrying on with other lovers or would-be lovers all the time, always needing to be wanted wherever however.  She was, as he put it, malleable – she would be whatever you wanted, what whoever wanted. “Easy.”

I remember.  When we were new, he watched me like a hawk at first, and I laughed at that.  I am unrelentingly exactly what you see. And not easy.  Watch me all you like, ha.

Finally his mind calmed, when he had blown me to pieces and still, well, I was just what I said I was, true to my word.  Then for a little while, he lived as one thing, an integrated person who was also what he said he was.

But then, at some point, I guess, he realized he was more at home with duplicity. Entropy.  

For several months, increasingly every day I would feel certain he was again lying to me somehow.  To honor him, to honor my word to honor him, I put these feelings aside as my problem.  He would act so hurt to be suspected, and I didn’t want to hurt him.  I had sworn never to hurt him intentionally.  So, I imagined he was betraying me then I put that imagining aside as an evil fantasy.  Until I was having to put my own mind aside almost constantly for his sake.  And when I would look around me and see clear evidence that he was “elsewhere” really, though he was still here, his utter disinterest in things he claimed to love, his brewery, his dog, the kids, me – then I chafed finally, but he looked me right in the eye, dead in the eye, held my gaze, and told me no, that we were fine, that he was just tired.  And I blamed myself for doubting him.  And I cried.  And he watched me cry.  And I tried to be better.

Now, I think about those condoms.  Places like that, not homes, people like that, who would do that, who are just one of however many, and mean nothing truly to anyone, just points to leverage.