11:00 am

Valerie came back. She looked so beautiful this morning as she was nervously rearranging my furniture. And she’s sober. There was a clarity in her eyes that I hadn’t seen in a long time.

She said her primary activity these days was apologizing to people. Of course, I’m on her short list. Apologize to friends, family and the ex-husband. Just tick them off the list one by one and purge your conscience. My sarcasm lasted all of two seconds. With a few words, she ripped it away. She’s always been able to do that to me.

She said I was at the end of a very long list, that she had to work her way up to me. Why did she have to come back now to open up old wounds? I’ve already got enough to deal with.

When we dated, she was beautiful and funny and outgoing. I asked her to marry me several times, but she always refused, saying she didn’t deserve me. In those days, I never understood why she would say that. I loved her and wanted to be with her. Then one day, she said she was ready and asked me to marry her. She told me I was the kindest and most beautiful man she had ever met, that she loved my sly smile and wanted to see it every day.

I tried so hard to treat her with the love and kindness she said she wanted, the way dad treated mom. In the beginning, she accepted my efforts. But then she started to pull away. It wasn’t long before she was drinking every day, trying to fill a void I couldn’t erase.

I tried to take care of her, to take away her pain. I’d pick her up off the floor and clean her up. Then after putting her to bed, I’d sweep up the broken glass on the floor and throw out the burned and abandoned meal in the kitchen. The next morning, I’d try to smile and tell her everything would be okay. She would yell at me and tell me to stop helping her, that she didn’t need a caretaker.

I thought that if I loved her enough, she would be able to stop drinking. But the more I tried, the more she drank. She hated me for being kind to her because it didn’t fit with the loathing she had for herself. She’d try to pick fights with me. She wanted me to yell and scream and throw things at her. But I couldn’t. She was my wife.

It’s so ironic that she came back the day after my birthday. When I would give her something special for her birthday, she would always throw it back at me. She hated me for remembering her special days because she never remembered mine. It was just another reminder of her failure as a wife. So eventually, I stopped wishing her Happy Birthday or Merry Christmas or Happy Valentines Day or Happy Anniversary.

Eventually she started disappearing, first for hours, then for days. One day, she came home sober and asked me for twenty thousand dollars to enter a treatment program. She said she didn’t want to tell me where it was, that she needed to do this herself, so I gave her the cash. Uncle Jonas found her a week later, shacked up with a guy in a dive somewhere. She had done a lot of things before, but she had never outright lied to me. That was the end for us. I knew it and she knew it. We were divorced two weeks later. I gave her the settlement she asked for and she walked out of my miserable life.

I buried that part of my life. I never wrote about her. I tried not to think about her, how she failed me and how I failed her.

This morning, she told me that there was no one in the world she hurt more than me. And she’s right. Yet I still love her after all this time. When I looked at her, she seemed to be sincerely and truly sorry. God, I hope it’s true. I so want it to be true.

5:00 pm

I spent the day with Val. It was just like those early days, before all the crap came down on us. We talked and enjoyed each other’s company. Max caught us twice. Val called while Max was over and I couldn’t, for the life of me, turn off that answering machine. Then Max conveniently showed up when we were coming back from the market. She seemed amused to find out that I had an ex, but there was something in her eyes that said she would have preferred that Val wasn’t around. Could she be jealous? Despite what I’ve been feeling about Max, I thought we weren’t like that.

9:00 pm

Max dropped a bomb on me about Val this afternoon and, sure enough, Val confirmed it. She almost left without taking the cash that I had left out for her, but in the end, she came back for it. In the end, it was all about the cash. Why do I keep trying to believe in things that aren’t there? I’m such a fool.

Somebody is destroying my doorbell. I wish they would just leave me alone.

11:45 pm

I look like a drowned rat. Max and I walked around the park for hours in the rain. I’ve never had a friend like her before. She seems to understand me on an emotional level. We barely talked, but her presence was so strong, like she was telling me I wasn’t alone. She’s the one who’s been making life bearable for me. She’s always there when I need her and she was here for me tonight.