The Front Line

I live my life in stories

By midafternoon, she had already made enough trips up and down the hallway that one of her clients finally laughed and said, “Every time I’m in here, all I hear is your heels running back and forth. And every time I see you at court, you’re running there too.” She laughed because he was not wrong. “I don’t really know another speed. If I slow down, none of this is going to get done.” He laughed, she laughed, and then, naturally, she got up and went right back down the hallway.

It had actually been a good day. Not peaceful. Peaceful was apparently something other women did in linen pants while drinking tea. Her days came with ringing phones, people appearing in doorways, somebody needing something signed, somebody else needing something explained, and at least one minor crisis that had somehow become hers. But it had been good. There had been lovely moments with clients, the kind that reminded her why she still liked the work even when the work seemed determined to consume every available inch of her life. People had come in worried and left calmer. Things had been solved. She had laughed. She had helped. For once, the chaos had felt useful instead of merely loud.

Then she looked down at her phone.

The message was about her husband, although even that word felt oddly disconnected from the reality of her life now. He had been gone for months. Not vaguely gone. Not emotionally distant in some abstract, literary way. He had made an active choice not to be part of her life while continuing, quite successfully, to be part of other people’s. He spoke to other people. Saw other people. Showed up elsewhere. He simply did not show up in hers.

She did not remember what he looked like anymore. She did not remember what he sounded like. That was not grief being dramatic. It was not a metaphor. It was just a fact, strange and ugly in its simplicity. A man who had once occupied enormous amounts of space in her life had been absent long enough that the details of him were no longer sitting there waiting for her.

And then somebody sent her a message absolutely shredding him.

It was vicious. Personal. The kind of message that seemed to arrive with an assumption attached to it. Surely she would agree. Surely she, of all people, had something to add. Surely the woman he had hurt, the woman he had left standing in a life he no longer wanted to occupy, would be willing to pull up a chair and help tear him apart.

Instead, she got furious.

Not sad. Not nostalgic. Not confused. Furious.

The response happened before she had time to assemble one intelligent thought about it. She told the sender, in no uncertain terms, that what they had said was absolutely and unequivocally untrue, that she would not hear or discuss another word of it, and that if there was anything further to say, they could say it to her face because she would be perfectly happy to come address it in person.

Then she hit send and stared at the phone.

Well.

That was interesting.

Because for all the things she had expected to feel about him by now, that had not been one of them. She had expected pain. She had expected anger. She had expected the occasional wave of grief to catch her somewhere inconvenient, because apparently grief enjoyed poor timing and fluorescent lighting. She had expected to keep learning how to live around the enormous fact of somebody choosing not to be there.

She had not expected her first instinct, when somebody came for him, to be to step directly in front of him.

There had been no internal debate. No inventory of everything he had done. No pause to ask whether he would ever do the same for her. No sensible little voice reminding her that this was a man who would not even stand beside her. None of that got a chance to speak.

Her instinct was faster.

That was the part she could not get over.

A man could remove himself from her life so completely that she no longer remembered his face or his voice, could choose over and over again to exist everywhere except beside her, and somehow the second somebody came at him unfairly, some ancient part of her still moved first and asked questions later.

The irony was almost offensive.

He would not stand beside her.

And she would still stand in front of him.

She thought about that off and on for the rest of the afternoon while the office kept moving around her. There were more clients, more questions, more papers, more trips down the hallway. At one point she nearly laughed at herself because apparently this was what emotional growth looked like now: thirty-eight years old, running through an office in heels, completely unable to remember what her husband sounded like, but prepared to appear in person if somebody decided to talk shit about him.

Fantastic.

Very stable.

Excellent work all around.

But underneath the humor was something she could not dismiss. She loved people hard. Apparently harder than she sometimes knew what to do with. And maybe that was not always wise. Maybe it had cost her more than once. Maybe there were entire chapters of her life that would have been easier if she knew how to shut love off the minute somebody stopped behaving in a way that deserved it.

She did not know how to do that.

By the time she got home, the house was quiet. It was not her week with the kids, and she was learning that her life now seemed to arrive in alternating versions. One week there was noise, mess, somebody calling “Mom,” shoes in ridiculous places, snacks disappearing, and no room in the day that belonged entirely to her. The next week there was silence so complete she could hear herself think, which was frankly overrated.

The tears came, because they usually did when there was nothing left to outrun. She had spent all day moving faster than whatever was chasing her emotionally, and eventually the office closed, the heels came off, and the feelings caught up.

But the tears did not last long.

Because she kept returning to that one moment. Not to him. Not to the marriage. Not even to the message itself. To the split second in which instinct answered before hurt could.

That was the part that stayed.

There was a man she did not remember how to picture anymore. A man whose voice had disappeared from her memory. A man who had chosen, deliberately and repeatedly, not to stand beside her.

And none of that mattered fast enough.

That was the thing.

The hurt was real. The absence was real. The choice he had made was real. But when somebody came for him, all of it was slower than love.

He had made his choice about where to stand, and it was not beside her.

Fine.

But when somebody came for him, her body answered before her pride, before her anger, before every goddamn reason she had to stay exactly where she was.

She stepped in front of him.

He could choose distance. He could choose silence. He could choose every room but hers.

But if somebody came swinging at the man she loved, they were still going to have to come through her first.

Judith L. Hampton

Attorney At Law

Hampton Law Firm