Are things easier with time? Maybe. Maybe not.
The days are easier to get through because I have a pattern to follow. I’m back at work. I have projects to occupy my mind. I can almost sleep through the night now. In my dreams, Ben and I are together. We are free. We are wild. We are what we were. In the mornings, I ache for my dreams to be real, but it’s a familiar ache, and while it feels like it might kill me, I know from having felt it the day before that it won’t. And maybe that’s how some of my strength comes back.
I rarely cry in public anymore. I’ve become a person about which people probably say, “She’s really bounced back quite nicely.” I am lying to them. I have not bounced back nicely. I’ve just learned to impersonate the living. I have lost almost ten pounds. It’s that dreaded last ten that magazines say every woman wants to lose. I suppose I have the body I’ve always wanted. It doesn’t do me much good.
I go places with Ana, to flea markets and malls, restaurants and cafés. I’ve even started to let her invite other people. People I haven’t seen for ages. People who only met Ben a few times. They grab my hand and say they’re sorry over brunch. They say they wish they could have known him better. I tell them, “Me too.” But they never know what I mean.
But when I’m alone, I sit on the floor of the closet and smell his clothes. I still don’t sleep in the middle of the bed. His side of the room is untouched. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think two people lived in my apartment.
I haven’t moved his PlayStation. There is food in the refrigerator that he bought, food I will never eat, food that is rotting. But I can’t throw it out. If I look in that refrigerator and there are no hot dogs, it will just reinforce that I am alone, that he is gone, that the world I knew is over. I’m not ready for that. I’d rather see rotting hot dogs than no hot dogs, so they stay.
Ana is very understanding. She’s the only person that can really get a glimpse of this new life I lead. She stays at her place now, with an open invitation for me to come over anytime I can’t sleep. I don’t go over. I don’t want her to know how often I can’t sleep.
If I can’t have Ben, I can have being Ben’s widow, and I have found a modicum of peace in this new identity. I wear my wedding ring, even though I no longer insist people call me by my married name. I am Elsie Porter. Elsie Ross only existed for a couple weeks, at most. She was barely on this earth longer than a miniseries.
I still have not received the marriage certificate, and I haven’t told anyone. Every day I rush home from work, expecting it to be waiting for me in the mailbox, and every day, I am disappointed to find a series of credit card offers and coupons. No one alerted the national banks that Ben is dead. If I didn’t have other things to be miserable about, I’m pretty sure this would set me off. Imagine being the kind of woman that gets over her dead husband only to find his name in her mailbox every day. Luckily, Ben never leaves the forefront of my mind, so I can’t be provoked into remembering him. I am always remembering him.