The Last Ordinary Tuesday
The mug was still in the cabinet.
I'd moved it twice, once to the back of the shelf, once to a box in the garage. Both times I brought it back. It was ridiculous. An oversized ceramic mug from a bed and breakfast in Maine that she'd liked so much that she asked the woman at the front desk if she could buy it. The woman said just take it. So she did. She carried it home wrapped in a sweater in her suitcase and used it every morning for many years.
I was standing in the kitchen looking at it when the phone rang. A friend checking in. We talked for a bit, exchanged news. Made plans to catch up in person soon.
After we hung up I made coffee I didn't want and sat down at the table. I was looking at the mug again. I seem to do that a lot lately, stand in rooms looking at things that used to belong to someone else's mornings.
I am not a romantic. But what I have been thinking about more recently could easily be mistaken for something a romantic would say. She would have been the first to tell you I was no such thing.
I didn't cry at our wedding. I find Valentine's Day mildly embarrassing for everyone involved. I once sat through The Notebook and spent most of it irritated by the weather in it. She thought that was the funniest thing she'd ever heard. She told that story many times over the years. "He was annoyed at the rain."
Here's what nobody tells you when you're young and falling: The feelings, the racing pulse, the obsessive thinking, the absolute certainty that this particular human was assembled by the universe with you in mind. That's real, and it's extraordinary, but it has a shelf life. Your brain builds a tolerance to it the way it builds a tolerance to anything. Scientists probably have a name for it. Poets have a better one. Most feel it as butterflies.
Either way, it ends. Not a finale ending. Just the butterflies.
It's only one part of something much larger. And it's the first part most people mistake for the whole thing.
I noticed the way she held that coffee cup, both hands wrapped around it as if seeking its warmth, even in summer. Everything about her was interesting to me in a way that felt permanent and was not permanent and was also not supposed to be.
But what comes next is not the loss of that. It only feels that way. It’s when life comes barging through the door.
Not dramatically. Just the accumulation of everything: the mortgage, the job, the kids who don't sleep and then don't stop and then have their own lives and problems you can't fix. Years going by while you were dealing with the years going by.
The butterflies don't die. They just stop showing up to work.
Unfortunately, for most people, those initial feelings are all they understand. With them gone, they walk away from something they never knew they were leaving.
This is the part that separates people. The long, unglamorous, mostly invisible work of keeping that promise on the days it costs you something. You just wake up and do it again and try to be the kind of person who stays.
I went quiet when I should have spoken. I walked around the block many nights, a reluctant dog in tow, before I could make myself come inside. While I was faithful, there were quiet years I'm not proud of. She had her own version of those years.
But we stayed. And at some point, no single moment, no revelation, more like a tide coming back in, we stopped just staying and started choosing. I don't know exactly when it happened. I know that it did. And I know that what grew on the other side of all of it was not what we had at the beginning. It was bigger than that. Heavier. Built from everything we'd survived rather than everything we'd imagined.
It’s a look across a room that carries an entire conversation. It's knowing another person so completely, their fears, their silences, the specific way she wraps both hands around an oversized mug. It stops being something you feel and becomes something you simply are.
I didn't have words for it then. I do now. That's the kind of thing you figure out too late.
What I didn't understand, sitting across from her at this same table on any number of ordinary Tuesdays, was that ordinary Tuesdays don't announce themselves as the last one. The house was quiet in the way it gets when it's just the two of you again, which turns out not to be an ending but a beginning you didn't know to expect. She had that mug. I was pretending to read. I was actually just watching her the way I used to at the very start, except it wasn't the same feeling. It was built from everything we knew about each other, the full and complicated and sometimes maddening truth of another person, and choosing her anyway.
I didn't say anything.
I never said it enough. That's the true thing about me that I understand the least and she understood completely and stayed anyway.
The coffee had gone cold. I was still at the table.
The call I received from my friend wasn't just to check on me. He is a good friend and I don't tell him that either, because I am not, as previously established, a romantic. This time he had news.
He's one of those who struggled when the butterflies failed to show up. His first marriage didn't survive. I watched it happen and didn't have the words then that I have now. His call was to say he's getting married again in the spring, a small gathering and he wanted me to be there. I'll go, and at some point I'll pull him aside and tell him what I've been thinking, that the feeling at the start is not a promise of what's coming. It's an invitation. The promise comes later, in the middle, when you make it one ordinary day at a time.
And I'll tell him to say the thing. Whatever he's feeling. Out loud. Even when it doesn't come easy.
Especially when it doesn't come easy.
Don't wait for the last ordinary Tuesday.