I decided not to go on the bike ride I was planning for yesterday evening because I've had trouble sleeping after I ride, and I've been particularly short on sleep for the past week. Instead I took a short catnap before eating dinner. My wife wasn't hungry, and was getting ready to go to the grocery store. I wondered why she wasn't asking me to go with her, but am not so fond of shopping that I offered my company, plus I had my own errand to run. I had to find out what my options are with regard to my misbehaving phone.
She left before me, and I finished my meal and headed out to talk to the cell phone folks. As I suspected, my only real option at this point is to upgrade my phone, which will cost me less than any of the choices for getting a working phone without upgrading. When I walked out of the store, it was still a simply gorgeous evening, and I was feeling a strange combination: still really disappointed that I wasn't riding, still physically wiped out from lack of sleep, and . . . well . . . lonely. I've been feeling lonely a lot, lately, and isolated from all the people I should be closest to, who are most important to me. In some cases the distance has been physical, in others only emotional and relational, but this feeling has been my constant companion since we got back from our marriage encounter convention, and everything I've tried to do about it in any of my relationships has been either completely ineffective or only mildly helpful.
I decided that what I'd do about it last night would be to meet my wife at the store and help her with the shopping. I was a little concerned she might be finished already, but it seemed like she was putting together a pretty substantial list, so I thought I'd probably catch her halfway through. I found her car in the parking lot fairly quickly, though there was a moment I thought I had missed her, when I'd passed down the aisle I expected her to be parked in and found someone else's identical year and model van, but not ours. But I was pleased when I spotted her car in the next row, with a vacant space next to her. I went into the store and started looking for her.
I gave a cursory glance to the produce area, but given how long she'd been gone I didn't expect to see her there, and indeed I didn't. This grocery store is large enough that it has a center row that crosses all the grocery aisles, and has a non-grocery section at the end of the store with furniture and various other household items. There are basically three ways to cross the width of the store, then, the standard ones in the front and back, and the center row. I used all three of them, carefully searching the whole store, and couldn't find her. Of course, it's the twenty-first century, so I just took out my cell phone to call her, and realized that it was dead because I haven't been able to get it to charge.
I went back out to the car to try to get my phone to make enough contact with the charger that I could communicate with her. But there was some really old history at work in my feelings as I did. In the early days of our marriage, she would frequently lie to me about where she was going while she carried on behind my back. On a couple of occasions I caught her not being where she told me she was. These feelings came back to me as I frustratedly struggled with my phone, wondering where she could be, not able to stop myself from at least wondering if there was a sinister reason she hadn't asked me along, though I quickly cast that thought aside. Finally I got the phone to connect long enough to see that she had previously texted me to remind me to go to the phone store; I hadn't mentioned before she left that I was still going to do that. Of course, she was texting a dead phone. I managed to snap off a text to her asking where in the store she was, careful to make sure I asked more specifically than a generic "where are you?" that might get me back an "at the store," after which I could just picture my phone dying and my being left not knowing where to find her. It turns out she'd been being waited on by a very slow clerk in the deli, where I hadn't paid much attention in my certainty she must be done there already. She still had most of her shopping yet to do, and so we worked together to get it finished. We were cashed out by a coworker (from India?) who moonlights there, who apparently sees my wife often but has never seen us together there.
There is a far more disconcerting set of thoughts and feelings that I had last night during this episode, with frightening implications in the present rather than being mere echoes of our forgiven (if not completely forgotten) past. And I am too ashamed of and disturbed by them to share them out loud.
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