Used to be

It's amazing, the degree to which Nancy is receding in my memory. The other day, talking to her on the phone briefly (and tensely, thanks to a palpable undertone of anger in her voice), I realized suddenly I could not picture her face in detail.

I was shocked for a minute, but not nearly as much as you might think.

One thing the last couple of weeks has been able to do for me is to talk to enough people and start to pull together a better picture of what my marriage was like. It's lopsided, of course, but as I try to give people a picture of the real problems Nancy presented -- the coldness, the shallowness, her infidelities, the lying she fell into toward the end, and her inability to see me as anything but a bother and problem in her life -- I keep thinking, jeez, this was not a good woman for me to be with!

Did she have good points? Yes. She got along easily with strangers. She was financially quite responsible. She had a fun side, a goofy streak that was pretty large. She could cook, she was strong and didn't mind working. And she could be affectionate.

But maybe it's a hallmark of how things turned out that all I remember is her self-interest, her distance, the fact that she seemed to lack deep interests in anything, particularly in learning new things. She always seemed to have one foot out the door (years later, I learned she planned and had a tryst with a used-to-be barely a month before our wedding, and hooked up with the same guy again a year ago last January while I was out of town at a conference), she always seemed to be more looking out for herself, not for us-as-a-couple.

Was I without flaw? No. I had a brief fling a couple of years into our marriage, something I almost immediately regretted and realize now I shouldn't have let get physical. I could be cold, temperamental, demanding. I was also in untreated and very serious clinical depression, but Nancy, not seeing or not focusing on the signs, chose to believe I was just... mean. At times, maybe I can be, but it's not at my core.

I worry that Nancy is a personable veneer over a very mean woman.

Or, rather... I don't. She's not my worry any more. She's a stranger I used to be married to.