Foe

by Iain Reid

We have developed and refined a relationship. Predictable, stable, certain, normal, routine, lifelike. One day ends, another starts. Over and over. It’s a comforting rhythm.

It’s a chance to wake up. How many people live day to day in a kind of haze, moving from one thing to the next without ever feeling anything? Being busy without ever being absorbed or excited or renewed? Most people don’t ever think about the full range of achievable existence; they just don’t.

Habitual, comfortable activity is the worst kind of prison, because the bars are concealed.

We get only so much mental space in which to store our memories, and there’s no reason for me to waste it on what came before. I wasn’t myself then. I was someone else, something less, a lesser version of the man I have since become.

Anybody can remember details if you ask them to, I say, but it doesn’t mean it actually happened that way.

I don’t know if he understands marriage or how committed relationships function. You can’t really understand a relationship until you live it, unless you’re in it. That’s part of what made everything so exciting for Hen and me. We were starting out together, we’d committed to each other, but we still didn’t know all those small details about each other at first. Living with someone can’t be simulated or rehearsed. It has to be experienced, in real time. There is no substitute for shared involvement, for creating actual memories. Like, I know how Hen blows her nose. I’ve never thought about it until now, but I do. I know the cadence, the rhythm. She does it in the same tempo every time. These observations—her footsteps, how she blows her nose—they’re like little secrets.

Beauty isn’t fleeting. Beauty is eternal. But . . . I’m not. I’m fleeting. That’s more the point.