taking stock

I found myself in an odd position this week. It had to do with love and the future and the past and one big cheese ball of happiness, a mixture of joy that might once have been but was no longer there, and hadn’t been there for some time. I would guess years, and although not a betting woman I would offer Cricket’s right hind leg that I’m probably guessing correctly. Tied to an unpleasant, recurring date I wound my way through the glitter of children’s birthday greetings and those God awful morose and inexplicably floral sympathy cards and finally settled, as intended, in the anniversary section.

I hate it there. It’s a plastic wasteland of lies and discomfort and wishing there wasn’t so much gold trim. The neighboring wedding and engagement cards are acceptable and borderline whimsical, so full of promise and hope and all the stuff that made little Annie not our red-headed stepchild but our orphan hero. I have a strict anniversary card rule I’ve carted around since first seeing Kramer vs. Kramer, one I’m quite sure increases my Hallmark aisle discomfort exponentially. I never buy anything that doesn’t reflect the absolute fervor with which the couple lives their lives and loves one another. To me, doing anything less is like giving an engagement gift when the bride-to-be has already flushed her platinum ring. Thus the quandary in a northern Virginia Target: what to buy for a twosome no longer in love?

These sorts of situations make my heart ache, even more than the elderly who have part-time jobs at McDonald’s. I simply cannot fathom at this point in my life (and don’t you dare go digging in my archives) that someone would withstand a relationship that was any less than what they truly deserved, an abundance of love and a scattered, smothered, covered and chunked order of morning kisses and late-night talks. Money and dependence and situation be damned. You deserve a life of not giving in to watching yet another horrible episode of American Idol, but doing it because you just can’t believe the odd gleeful laugh she lets out at every one of Simon’s dreadful comments. Of smiling each and every time you think of him, even if he did give the phone to you when you violently shook your head to the negative, even when she’s had one too many flutes of champagne at the corporate event and offers the big boys much too much about your long-gone fraternity years. Of getting through the arguments and rough patches hand in hand.

Yet we all do it – we’ve all done it – to different degrees. Some of us for months, others for years, some of us for decades. Through a curbside coffee table scored on a big trash day to hermit crabs won at the shore boardwalk to the shared experience of newborn puppies and babies. We all do it. Like robots who convince ourselves that things will fix, that things will change. For most of us, they don’t. For many of us, the out is easier, a series of unreturned phone calls or a Dear John letter left on the kitchen table. An uncomfortable Easter Sunday conversation that has one or the other moving out before vows were exchanged. The others who enter the wrong union eventually succumb to the inevitable. They end up trapped.

Perhaps what left me most lost in the world of cardstock was not the fact that I had to find the most innocuous offender, the one least covered in interlocked white hands, bearing multi-sided talk of forever in poorly-written, saccharine verse. It was the fact that I know so few couples, if more than one even, for whom I’d buy one of those $4.99 cards. Everyone else I know is going through the motions, exchanging once-knowing, perhaps frisky shared looks at a dinner party for silence on a car ride home. For unexpected Tuesday mornings spent laughing over burned toast and predictable Wednesday nights spent on distant sides of a king bed.

I never, ever want to be in that situation. The reality that surrounds me goes against all that I’ve hoped for those in my inner circle and, most selfishly, for me. I can’t do it. It may mean I have to use a walker when I finally hobble down the aisle in a black sequined garment meant to camouflage all of my loose parts, but it won’t be like that. I just won’t do it.

I settled on a card with beautiful stitching that bore a simple interior message of good wishes, thankfully only two lines in length. It was sadly perfect, and I should have bought three of them in anticipation of the next two couple “celebrations.” And now I sit thinking of this passionless marriage that once might have been something great, of how these two people probably dread their anniversary more than I do solo wedding attendance, and I’m left without words. Just what exactly is there to say?