Our world violently shook. The foundation of our temple, for which we had built, cracked and split under the mounting tremors. The split concrete of broken love bisected us. I on one side. My wife on the other. Pillars toppled. The fog of smoke and masonry dust filled the air as everything else collapsed. Our marriage. Our relationship. Our love.
We looked to each other as the world burned.
A Delayed Ending
We walked the final days of man and wife. The divorce wouldn’t go through for months, but we both knew when we flew back home, our feet stepping down onto familiar soil, we’d go our separate ways. Something we’d begun mentally long ago.
There would be no repairing the damage. No restoring what we no longer had. What’s lost is not often found.
The final days of our month-long trip through South America. A trip I had hoped would bring us back together. I can’t speak for what she wanted. I don’t know. I likely never will.
Yet traveling the continent without a firm grasp of the language forced us to depend on each other and, often, only each other. We could not easily ask for help. For where to go. Where to eat. What to do with our crumbling marriage.
We both felt the trembles. We both knew what remained of our love rested on a fault line. Not a matter of if but when. When it would finally give. Collapse. Burn.
The trip turned us into more strangers than lovers. A familiar face in a crowd of unknowns. Yet the only face to cause a swelling pain in our chests. The eyes of love lost. Love lost never to be found. At least not with our eyes.
Machu Picchu, East Island, the Pacific, the Atlantic, Buenos Aires. A trip of a lifetime some might call it. Handcuffed to the person who caused the most pain. Who set the most fires. Who twisted the knife the deepest. It all gives such sentiment different meaning.
We struggled through much of the trip. Fights. One going for a walk while the other remained in the hotel. Silent dinners, always fearful the other would want to talk. Nights slept in separate beds when available, feeling the cold of the other body when not. The trip of a lifetime slowly bleeding life dry. One drip, one moment at a time. The slow drips are often much worse than sudden leaks. The drip of lost love here, a drop of crushed hope there. Nothing substantial, until looking down and there’s a puddle of lost life and lost soul.
We were both wounded animals, looking forward to the end of the trip. To the end of us. We couldn’t take the smoke from our burning temple. We struggled to stand under the shaking earth. The crack between us growing wider. The roof threatening to give.
The Little Painting
As we walked the streets of Buenos Aires I fell in love with the city. Maybe because the love I had to offer needed to go somewhere.
I don’t know if my wife wanted to walk as much as I did. She didn’t complain. We took in street tango dances. Not performance dances. Just people in love with the dance. In love with each other. I tried not to think about their love. If I did it forced me to think of my own.
We continued to walk.
We toured a museum. I don’t remember any exhibits. Just the stairs in. We walked past buildings more at home in Europe than South America. Past a massive chrome sculpture of a flower that bloomed and closed with the passing of time. I wondered how many more blooms we had left together. We sat in a park, watching an old man toss bread crumbs to birds. Neither of us talked. We had nothing left to say. Nothing remained to be said.
I wanted to talk with her. I wanted to conjure up magical words, words that would fix, that would mend. Words that would undo time. Words that would reignite the fire of love, that would draw a smile on her lips, that would melt our hearts and bodies back into one.
No such words existed.
So I said nothing. And we continued to walk.
A large street fair had infested a local park. Vendors hawking foods and trinkets and art. Incredible art. Memorable art. I can’t recall anything from the museum, but plenty from displays in tents and hanging from strings.
We turned to walk through the art. Neither of us directed or suggested. We both walked our own way into the displays. It just happens our own ways were together.
Paintings of all styles, of all talents, waved in the slight breeze as flags to their creator’s visions. Artists watched as we took in their craft. Hoping we’d stop. If not to buy, to appreciate.
One, in particular, caught my eye. The penned ink drawing of a face from three sides. The watercolor wash of a cityscape offering enough color to spark interest. To spark hope for the man and the directions he looked. I loved it.
Something touched my hand. It made me jump. I looked down to my palm, where my wife, perhaps without knowing, slid her hand into mine as she lost herself in the painting as well. We stood there, together, hands held, our world crumbling, absorbed in the imagined world on paper in front of us.
A sentence or two of Spanish writing filled the corner of the painting. I didn’t know what it said. The artist offered to translate. I turned him down and instead offered to buy it. I didn’t want to know what it said. I made up my own words.
It’s one of the few items I have to this day, more than a decade later, of that trip. One of the few things I tangibly have left of our marriage. Of our time together. Of our lives together.
I can read Spanish now. I could translate it if I wanted. But I don’t. When I see the writing my eyes gloss over the text, not seeing what it says. Only seeing what my mind wants to remember.
Because we held hands one last time, watching, as our world crumbled and burned.