Vachon Imagined

I married my opposite, bringing some truth to all those sappy songs about how you complete me.

A part of me wants to barf just typing that.

And yet, annoyingly, there is some truth to it.

My husband can be a locked drawer.

Not a regular locked drawer, either. More like a bank vault where you need two keys, a retinal scan, and probably a notarized letter from God.

And no one is finding the key.

Once he sees people for who they are, that’s it.

Including me.

He’s seen me be who I am and decided, nope. We’re not going back in there.

He’s seen me be hostile, angry, condescending. You name it.

And in many ways, he’s decided there are rooms in him I no longer have access to.

Gibraltar on steroids.

The more I wanted to talk to him, the firmer those doors became.

And me?

What do you want to know?

Let’s talk.

Let’s have coffee.

Just ask.

We are opposites.

I believe being sorry for something you’ve done is good. Confessing that you’re sorry is even better because it gives the body something it seems to crave: release.

The body wants revelation.

It wants to get the thing out.

My husband, like most of us, has learned something I have had to learn the harder way:

There are consequences.

People shut you out.

Doors close.

Sometimes they stay closed.

And if you’re following me, he has done this to me.

I have learned to accept it.

I probably won’t ever reach him again in certain places. He may never look at me the way he did when we first fell in love, when he was doing everything in his power to woo me.

And that’s okay.

Because being with him has taught me something about what real love actually looks like.

It doesn’t always open the door.

Sometimes trying harder makes it worse.

Sometimes the harder you push, the more firmly the door closes.

But love?

Total love.

Undivided love.

Nonjudgmental love.

Love accepts.

Not blindly.

Not passively.

It accepts with clarity what it is looking at, and then it decides.

I decide to love him.

I decide to stay with him.

Not because he is me.

Not because he completes me.

But because he has revealed me.

And that is better than romance.

Romance says, You are everything I ever wanted.

Love says, I see you.

Even the parts that make me want to install a security system.

Even the parts of him I cannot reach.

Even the doors that will probably remain closed.

I don’t have to break them down.

I don’t have to convince him to let me in.

I don’t have to make him become more like me so that I can feel loved.

I can love him as he is.

And, perhaps more importantly, I can finally love myself enough to accept that I am not entitled to every room in another human being.

That is truth.

That is love.

And, strangely enough, that is peace.