I Folded My Husband’s T-Shirt and Felt How Long Marriage Can Go Without Saying the Real Thing

Dear Delyara, It was just a plain dark T-shirt, clean and warm from the dryer, and still it managed to make me sad. Not because of the shirt. Because of what it represented — a life shared so closely that our laundry lives together, our bills live together, our children live inside the shape of our decisions, and yet some of the most important emotional truths still remain oddly untouched between us for weeks at a time. I folded the shirt neatly and thought how strange marriage can become. So practical. So interwoven. So intimate in structure and so lonely in feeling if two people get too tired to keep walking all the way toward each other. I put it on the pile and felt that old quiet grief again. Not the grief of absence. The grief of proximity without enough arrival.