Same As It Ever Was

by Claire Lombardo

She begins to consider how much she herself has changed since last they met, and the volume of those changes hits her forcefully and all at once; she is, upon reflection, more changed than not.

that old worry, so familiar to her, that you haven’t meant to someone as much as they meant to you—but

They are a family whose clock is always slightly askew, affections misplaced and offenses outsized. But it’s better, she thinks—please, God, it must be better—than the complete absence thereof.

There must be some marital sixth sense that induces one party—unknowingly wronged—to suddenly behave with excess integrity, effectively increasing the guilt of the wrongdoer. It makes her nervous.

she has grown comfortable dwelling in her own ludicrous minutiae.

it is a point of astonishment, really, how improbably lovely her life has become.

but because Mark was wearing a tie and had a master’s degree, and because Julia’s woes were frequently foregrounded in dealings with Duplo architecture and coerced carrot consumption, Mark was more vocally allowed to rue his responsibilities; that was just the way the world worked.

It was boring to rue the suburbs; she was aware of this. She pictured the anthropology of her life like layers of shale, jagged and delicate, crumbling, but all, fundamentally, indistinguishable shades of gray. She lived elsewhere. Then she did not live elsewhere. It was all the same, really; everywhere, eventually, became elsewhere. It was a cliché to be this person; she got bored just thinking about it, the sadness over nothing, the fact that she was resentful of the easiest life in the world. And yet she couldn’t help herself.

Marriage was trying; marriage was burying the hatchet. But they had not buried any of their hatchets; instead she’d covered the hatchets with an assortment of decorative hand towels and they were both pretending that the hatchets didn’t exist.

Julia wondered how some people orchestrated their lives to be like that, primed and ready at all times to be walked in on, pots enticingly a-simmer and alluring projects under way, as if they’d never been started and would never end and instead just exist, in perpetuity, in a picturesque in-between.

Rich people, too, had a knack for making romance out of historic hardship; she supposed it was easier to cinematize the past when you had the right set dressing.

Perhaps this had less to do with wealth and more with perspective, the ability to take your own narrative and polish it up, make it more digestible.

“You feel a great deal, that’s obvious. You just have a harder time making sense of it.”

“You can’t bank all of your happiness on a single person. That’s a recipe for insanity on all fronts.”

her daughter does not, at seventeen, have a ten-year plan; her daughter is observant and interesting and wholly, confidently herself, and Julia refuses to acknowledge the validity of a system that deems this not enough

Of course she always hoped her relationships, as they were beginning, wouldn’t meet their ends, but the fact was that she’d always expected them to.

because sadness got more confusing as you got older, accreted and layered and camouflaged itself until the source was buried beyond discovery.

Was that not the point of being married, having to carry less?

She’d never told anyone before. It seemed unbelievable that with all the chatter, all the white noise that came along with being a person, there was still something she had never told anyone; that with all the time they’d spent together, all they’d said to each other, there was still something she had never told Mark.

The strange ease of their relationship seemed to startle them both. Their lives were suddenly intertwined, their rapport complex and codified. They went on three dates, then four; then suddenly they’d gone on ten and stopped identifying them as such; they were simply together, a lot,

There was a manic quality to that time, awash in the blind, dumb admiration of another person, admiration untarnished by the inevitabilities of commitment, betrayals and meannesses and misunderstanding.

And when you fell for someone, she realized—she had never fallen like this before—you started to fall for yourself a little bit too.

She wondered, in more cynical moods, if one of the reasons these salad days were so intensely rosy was how little time they had to actually spend together, their limited interactions leaving them hungry for each other, their ample time apart allowing them room for romanticization.

She had not ever experienced certitude when it came to inarticulable feelings: love, for instance, or orgasms. She had known decent sex; she had known affection. But she had always been convinced that there must be a higher level of ascendancy.

Almost nothing ends up being as big of a deal as you think it’s going to be.

She’d been in such a hurry, but she can no longer entirely remember why. Had she known then what she does now—that it would all come to matter so little; and also that she wasn’t as weird as she’d thought, that there had surely been potential there for friendship, for community, for something other than utilitarian loneliness—she may have lingered longer, enjoyed her schooling instead of simply trying to get through it unnoticed. But of course if she hadn’t, everything would be different; if she’d had a more socially fruitful time in college, she may not have moved back to Chicago, almost certainly wouldn’t have met Mark. It’s an enormous, dizzying thought,

absorbing through osmosis some of his ease, because when she opened her eyes next it was morning.

because he’s supposed to know this; he of all people is supposed to know: that she isn’t a bad person, just occasionally bad at being a person.

“I’m doing the best I can,” she says, but it comes out sounding a little defensive, which undercuts her credibility, which bothers her, because she’s telling the truth, that her trying might not look like other people’s trying but it is nevertheless trying.

this complicit awareness of not wanting to ruin a good thing whether or not it was the best thing, because the best thing didn’t exist.

that he wasn’t as content with their life as she was. Maybe this was how everybody’s lives unfolded, just a series of maybe we should decisions made or not, succumbing to the silent lure of peer pressure without even realizing it.

not elation but equanimity. She was not inordinately happy—it was not crazy happiness, not full-throated wild happiness—but it was there, a calm she wasn’t used to feeling, a sense of oneness with the world, with her days.

she felt like she’d been deprived of some critical lessons in socialization right out of the gate, and trying to make friends, when you’d skipped those lessons, was like learning a new language relying solely on a handful of reticent subjects,

love that she’d never quite been able to define, love that wasn’t specifically anything, familial or sexual or aspirational, parental or romantic or platonic, but also wasn’t specifically not any of those things: love that was simply a point of fact, its own entity.

it is, perhaps, the most generous thing Mark has ever done, trusting her,

You were terrific company. It’s a chemistry thing, isn’t it? Don’t you sometimes just feel something for another person? Like you were meant to have found them? That’s how I felt about you when we met. Like I already knew you.”

Isn’t that part of what defines every relationship? That mixture of how much you need someone and how much they need you back? It’s never an equal amount. And it fluctuates—ideally it does—because both of those things are exhausting in their own right.

They were delicate, shy: married, suddenly, to each other. In their bedroom, nearly twenty-six years later, he kisses her again.

She sinks into brief contentment, the kind of contentment she’s only ever found with him.

Closeness and distance at the same time, antipathy and affinity, love and exhaustion. The way time moves, glacial and breakneck, the way two people fit together in a bed,