The People We Meet Along The Way

watched them lower the man I had promised forever to into the ground. I was far from perfect. I could admit that now—now that Evan wasn’t around to place the blame on me for all my mistakes and letdowns in life. I had loved him with everything I had. Yet, I knew that over the years, there was a point in time when maybe I’d stopped being in love with him. We met in college, both young, vivacious, and naïve—so very naïve. Evan was an architect, and I was a marketing executive at a prominent Manhattan advertising agency. Evan was the first guy who had ever told me he loved me. The first guy I had ever loved. The first guy who had made me feel special, and the first guy I had ever trusted. We were happy for a long time—until we weren’t. Maybe we should’ve ended it sooner. Perhaps if we had, then he’d still be there right now, alive and full of life, shielding his light blue eyes from that small glimmer of sunlight poking through the gray sky overhead.
I jumped when Evan’s brother grabbed my elbow in support. I foolishly wondered if he blamed me for this, the way I was blaming myself. Did Evan’s parents hate me? My guilt was eating me up inside, causing my thoughts to run rampant along with it. Evan’s mother had always been kind to me, treating me like a daughter, so my feelings weren’t justified in any way. It was my own conscience playing tricks on me.
I shifted my attention from the box containing the man I was supposed to grow old with to Carol and Tony O’Rourke, my in-laws. Both of them resembling their son, each in different ways. His charming smile that could light up the room was the same as his father’s, while his beautiful blue eyes mirrored his mother’s. He seemed to inherit a combination of the best traits of the two of them. His father’s calm demeanor, always handling the pressure when his mother would crumble, and his mother’s caring ways. His father placed his hand on his wife’s shoulder, holding her up in support, so much like Evan would’ve done for me if he were here in similar circumstances. Strange how just a few weeks ago, I had been planning a future without him, and now, here I was wondering how I’d ever survive even a day in a world where he no longer existed. A cold wind whipped across my tearstained face, stinging my skin as those painful memories slammed into my mind like an out-of-control locomotive, coursing through my veins and creating a deep gaping hole within my heart.
“Jillian, I don’t know what you want anymore. I love you, but I can’t keep going round and round with you like this. I don’t need a child to be happy, I just need you. But I’m starting to sense that maybe that’s not the only reason you’re unhappy.”
“Evan, do you know how inadequate I feel for not being able to give you what I know you really want, what you truly deserve? We talked about having kids for years, planning it down to the minute, and now here we are...two years after our deadline, more than a dozen negative pregnancy tests later and a less than favorable diagnosis from a fertility specialty that there will ever be a positive one.”
“It doesn’t matter. We can adopt, if that’s what you want.”
“But it won’t be ours...it won’t be yours, and I’m afraid years from now you’ll resent me because of it.”
“Damn it, Jillian, I don’t have time for this right now. I’m due in a meeting in ten minutes.”
That was the start of it all—why couldn’t I see it then? Never enough time. Never enough communication. Never enough faith in each other. It had become exhausting putting on a front for other people and trying to get back to the place we once were. Both of us knew we couldn’t go back in time, so the best we could do was settle on a new normal between each other.
Our decision to separate was mutual. I had told myself it would give us time to figure out where we were headed, where we wanted to go. But in the back of my mind, I knew whatever the final destination was, we more than likely weren’t headed there together. Only now was I able to realize how unfair it was of me to have that preset notion in my head while giving Evan a false sense that maybe we were fixable. But in nine years of marriage, I had realized something else—we had both grown up, and with that, we had grown apart.
Evan found an apartment. While I remained in our home, in a quiet suburb, about a forty-five-minute bus ride into the chaos of Manhattan. It was a house we had turned into a home, but years of painting, knocking down walls, replacing floors and kitchen cabinets couldn’t withstand the storm within our marriage. In a way I felt it should’ve been me who had left and found a new place to live, since I believed I had been the rift in the marriage, but Evan insisted it be him. With that insistence, I wondered if he was as unhappy as I was, and just unable to say it to spare my feelings. My feelings. He was always so afraid of hurting me by saying the wrong thing, so eventually he just shut down, and didn’t say much of anything at all.
Why didn’t I ever take his feelings into consideration? Especially on that last night. But how was I to know that would be the last time I ever spoke to him, the last time I ever hugged him, only to have him push me away? It was the last time I’d ever see that hurt in his eyes that led him out the door into the pouring rain after drinking more than he should