There is something, I found, to having a private experience. Most of adult life is narrated — to partners, to friends, to parents, to social media in whatever form your generation of adults uses it. The act of having a week that was entirely your own, that didn’t need to be explained or shared or made coherent for anyone else, turned out to be a small but real pleasure.
Not every hard thing needs an audience.
## The Night Before He Came Home
Friday night, the night before Nathan and Elaine returned. I had cooked dinner — nothing elaborate, pasta with some things from the farmers’ market, the kind of meal that requires attention for twenty minutes and then takes care of itself. I ate at the kitchen table and let my mind wander over the week.
I had been, I thought, braver than usual. Not dramatically brave — nothing that would warrant the word if I set it next to people who do genuinely difficult things. But I had said what I meant to say, and then I had not unsaid it when it became uncomfortable, and I had not let the uncertainty of what came next talk me into retreating to familiar managed ground.
The uncertainty was still there. I want to be honest about that. I did not feel certain, sitting at my kitchen table on a Friday evening, that what I’d done had been wise. I felt mostly that I had been honest, and that honesty was the best option I’d had available to me, and that I would need to live with the consequences of it whatever they turned out to be.