He wiped the bit of gunpowder from his white freckled cheek
“Because I know that I love you, I just don’t know what that means.”
His voice was light and thoughtful.

This was a glimpse of Lee. The first glimpse of him I had seen in weeks.
There was something different in his vibe that morning, and so I decided to ask him

“why do you want to go to marriage counseling, if you know you want to leave me?”

I had been married to Lee for nine years, but I hadn’t really seen him in a few months. He traveled for work, but that’s not what I mean. It’s like someone else had taken over his body, and Lee was being held hostage inside. For months his eyes had been different, someone washed out their glitter. He didn’t look at me, he looked through me. He stopped remembering basic things about me, told me I did things that I didn’t, and seemed to lose grip with reality. He was in love with someone else, that he just met, and they were planning a life together in a different country.

I had known for most of our marriage that Lee had some sort of mental health issue, but for a long time it was pretty easy to chalk it up to damage from deployment in the Marine Corps. As we moved through the stages of life, so did his darkness. I would tell him to seek treatment, and he would, and then he would quit, and so on. Nothing too far out of what is unfortunately normal.

We had finally landed on a patch of normalcy. We had two kids. We bought a house. We were making it, I thought.
I wish I would have looked harder.
I wish I would have looked much deeper into his eyes.
I wish I could have caught him.

but you can only catch someone if you see them falling.

The day that Lee hit the ground, he had already been falling for over a year. I can still close my eyes and remember the feeling
the gravitational pull on your soul when being scooped out of one reality
and the burn of being seared into another.