“This thing has seen better days,” he said as they walked through the damp grass toward the gazebo. She looked up to notice that indeed it had. The awning was falling apart, whole parts of the roof were decaying and the paint was chipped, but in the gray light of the cloudy day she hadn’t noticed it until he said something. The structure was still sound.
“Yes, it has,” she replied and thought, like many things between them, it was an appropriately dramatic setting for things to end.
She chose an outdoor location, getting a suggestion from her mom–a place she had never been and would not conveniently return to once it became the scene of the crime. She choose outdoors, despite the rain and the crisp 58 degree temperature, because so many of their pivotal moments had occurred in similar suburban park locations: their first date, first kiss, first fight, the night he decided he was going to marry her, the night she first told him she loved him, the night when she first let him hold her while she cried and she realized what a wonderful thing is was to be comforted by him. Outdoor settings are probably the markers of most adolescent relationships, back before there is a convient indoor place to call one’s own.
But now, twelve years later, after having shared homes together, they again sat outside as an alternative to a room in either of their parent’s houses.
“I don’t know what to say,” he finally started after a few minutes of silence while her teeth chattered. “There are so many things that are running through my head, but in the end they really don’t matter. In the end, I just can’t seem to find a fix. I wish I could, but there just isn’t a fix.”
When she eventually responded, she told him it was a shame that he had never allowed her to be a part of the solution, or even the attempt at finding a solution. That is was never them trying to find the fix. That it was such a huge mess that no one on his own could find a fix. But like most of what she had tried to say over the past six months, it made no difference. Really, the point should never have been about fixing. At best with relationships, over time, people can just hope to tend and mend the tears and holes as best they can. Marriage isn’t about looking put together, like the culture seems to say, it is about holding together. But he was past the point of understanding that. So, instead they sat for a while longer in the sturdy, but worn down gazebo that no one had taken the time to fix up, until he realized that his lighter was busted and he couldn’t get his cigarette lit.
