page 271 of my memoir

He’s worn this same jacket since we were in high school. It’s an army surplus, which I just recently found out was from the Vietnam war. I always wondered why he chose to buy fatigues of any kind, since he’s always been dead set against war and did not even bother registering to vote for years due to his fear of being drafted, but I do remember a night when I wore the camo pants that matched them, which means at some point, he went out and bought the set of them.

My only guess as to their purpose would be that he bought them for paintball, and now that I think about it, where did his paintball gun disappear to? Did he sell it before he went cross-country? or before we moved in together? It never did appear in the apartment we shared together in Gardner, so it must have been sold soon after his return from California. Maybe he never owned a paintball gun? Maybe he rented it? I never thought much about where the gun came from until now. Isn’t it funny how you can know something for years, but when you sit and think about it for a minute it becomes a mystery so elusive your mind cannot possibly solve it?

And how about that apartment in Gardner, huh?

It was an attic apartment with slanting ceilings, a gas stove for heat and walls so thin that we could hear our neighbor’s kitten crying for hours and hours on end because no one was there, but we were there, and more than once I thought about breaking into that neighbor’s apartment and keeping the kitten company. However, every time I mentioned it he would tell me, absolutely do not do that, and for some reason I actually listened to him. It didn’t always happen, me listening to him I mean. There were many times when he disagreed with me and I went ahead and did it anyway, some of those times it was for the better, some of those times for the worst, but always, whatever my choice was, he accepted it. It didn’t mean he liked it, or even that eventually he approved of the decision, but he did accept it and we moved on, and this is how we’ve managed to span close to half of our lives together.

I do crazy, slightly insane things, like insist on going to a weekly writing workshop, and he accepts it, just as if normal people do this all the time, but whether he tells me directly, or just eludes to it, I know he knows that this is not normal, that I am not normal, and again he just accepts it for what it is, and only occasionally will I hear him say, ‘freak’, to which I reply, ‘you’re the one that married me’.

Just recently, he’s been replying to my reply: ‘what choice did I have?’

To which I say, 'you could've stayed in California'