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But what could possibly fill what is already full?
My husband has no name; he is my husband, he belongs to me.
Monday has always been my favorite day of the week. Sometimes it wears a deep royal blue—navy blue, midnight blue, Egyptian blue, sapphire blue. But more often Monday takes on a practical blue, economical and inspirational: the color of Bic pens, my students’ workbooks, and simple clothing that goes with everything. Monday is also the day of labels, resolutions, storage boxes. The day of smart choices and reasonable decisions. People have told me that loving Mondays is a brainiac thing—that only nerds are happy when the weekend is over.
my love of beginnings.
wonder whether I’m the only one to notice the universal women’s waiting room.
“I’ve never done anything but wait outside the closed door.”
makes it clear that my husband has been lying to me: obviously, he has no problem sleeping in the light.
Tuesday is a quarrelsome day. The explanation is simple: its color is black and its Latin etymology reveals that it’s the day of Mars, the god of war. The storming of the Bastille took place on a Tuesday. September 11, too. Tuesday is always a dangerous
Actually, our children more than get along: they are co-dependent. (Is this a character trait I passed down to them unwittingly?)
A work on gardening or a book on ancient Egypt can still easily remind me of my husband.
It, too, has abandoned me.
Will he pick up on the clues I sprinkle in his path? Last night I was incapable of reading a single line, but this time I lose myself in the novel, which makes my afternoon go by more quickly, effortlessly consuming the remaining hours.
something to your hair?” he asks me with a quick kiss. (When will he finally really kiss me? Anything less than two seconds is not the kiss of someone in love.)
No one can see my neuroses except me. The way I see myself is not how other people see me. Everything is okay. I belong here.
She is radiant. He tempers her. Together, they complement each other, like two pieces of machinery that fit together exactly, a perfectly oiled gear where the
deviations are also the synergies that render movement possible. I believe this is what we call “chemistry.”
More generally, the idea that my husband existed before meeting me is surreal, even revolting.
An idyllic honeymoon might have given me the strength necessary to confront the first months of our marriage.
Why doesn’t he say I was part of the story, too?
they say we.
Armed with this quantitative and qualitative data, I could thus evaluate whether our relationship is normal or cold.
So my husband thinks his best friend is married to a pineapple, while he married a clementine. He lives with a winter fruit, a banal and cheap fruit, a supermarket fruit. A small, ordinary fruit that has none of the indulgence of the orange nor the originality of the grapefruit. A fruit organized into segments, practical and easy to eat, precut, ready for use, proffered in its casing.
Writing always shows me the solution.
If only I had the courage to challenge him:
over the years to identify two different kinds of tears. First, tears of frustration or rage. Violent, severe, red tears. They don’t stream, they spurt. It’s easy to recognize them because they leave behind puffy faces and swollen eyes.
He puts the energy and determination that I dream of investing in our relationship into his sleep.
Wednesday is an orange day, like a clementine. Since this morning, I’ve been taunted by several objects with an orange hue: my mandarin-scented daytime lotion, my watchband, the grated carrots for tonight’s dinner in the fridge.
Each new person who enters into our life is an additional dilution of his attention, a dilution of him, and I’m horrified by this. The energy he expends toward others hurts me: it tells me that I am not enough for him.
His forgetfulness began seemingly overnight a few months after the birth of our daughter. My
Does she do it to him for attention?
Wednesday is also the day of Mercury.
Is it a power play, a way for him to assert dominance over me?
People think it’s all that anxious waiting that creates dependence and fuels passion.
Sometimes we even forgot to make love because we had so much to talk about. Maybe that’s why we’ve always kissed less than other couples. Lovers who kiss all the time often do it to hide their lack of things to talk about: when one’s mouth is glued to another’s, it’s difficult to have a deep discussion on the meaning of life.
It is the universally recognizable sadness of impossible love.
would tell her that it is even more painful to love someone you already have.
I love. But don’t think at the moment of loving you I find myself innocent in my own eyes, or approve.
“I think you’re way off the mark. You’ve never thought that maybe your husband loves you more than you love him? You say that you’re madly in love with him, but don’t you think he’s actually the one who’s really in love? Between the two of you, he’s the one whose love has moved beyond the passionate honeymoon phase. You’re still living in the obsessive stage that normally only lasts the first few months of a relationship. You don’t even trust him, as though you’ve built nothing together. Maybe things aren’t exactly how you’d like them to be, but you said it yourself: your husband supports you,
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“If we are always preparing to be happy, it is inevitable that we will never be so.”
My yellow Thursday starts joyfully.
Now this morning’s yellow joy appears to me in its true form. It’s not the yellow of the natural light of day. It’s not the yellow of the sun and photosynthesis. It’s the artificial light of an electric lamp. It’s the yellow of lies, of adultery and hypocrisy. How could I have let myself be so foolishly blinded?
Friday is not ideal for concentration. It feels like a little vacation each week, a day volatile as a gas and comforting as homemade mashed potatoes.
Friday brings me good luck because of its color: green. It’s not just a superstition—there’s real evidence to back this up. Whenever I’ve really needed it, I’ve looked for green around me, in a nearby object or in a landscape.
love too intensely and I’m consumed by my own love (analysis, jealousy, doubt)—so much so that when I’m in love, I always end up slightly extinguished and saddened. When I love, I become harsh, serious, intolerant. A heavy shadow settles over my relationships. I love and want to be loved with so much gravitas that it quickly becomes exhausting (for me, for the other person). It’s always an unhappy kind of love.
Ten years between the moment you realize it’s not working anymore and the moment you decide to leave.
Because at some point we all have a decision to make: choose to love or to be loved.
Sunday is unanimously white.
It’s also a universal promise of peace: my husband
My heart is so full of my love for my husband. Will it stop beating if it loses its object? Will it still function with no driving force, no purpose?
But as I often do when she’s suffering, I diverted my gaze and waited for it to pass. It’s not my fault that she feels everything so intensely, that small irritations cause her such great pain.
