Home; or, Hindsight

Home.

I never thought I would feel a sense of dread thinking that word. But walking up the stairs to our apartment tonight--the night outside dark and the world inside empty--I felt my heart sink with sadness as I approached the door. I'm alone and nothing seems right.

I'm waiting for my husband to return from California. He's somewhere between Dallas and New York right now, and thinking too much about his exact location in the sky activates my plane phobia and terrifies me that I could lose him, too.

He shouldn't have gone to the wedding. I needed him this weekend. I was glad to be with my family, glad to have my mom to coddle me and my dad to hug me and one of my sisters to make me laugh. But I needed my husband to grieve with me. I needed him to hold my hand and talk with me about the baby and work through this together.

I didn't even realize I could miscarry while he was gone until the morning he left. I wasn't thinking. My mind didn't work quite right those first few days. And then he was at the airport and I suddenly pictured myself bleeding and going to the hospital and him being 3,000 miles away. And I realized how stupid the whole situation was.

I was a cranky bitch to him while he was gone, but it was only because I missed him so much. And it felt so utterly wrong that I was sitting with my family crying while he was off at a wedding full of happy people. Not that I thought he was one of those happy people--I know that he wasn't. But we should have been together, dealing with this together. Not on some sort of weird marriage sabbatical just when we needed each other most.

I've cried a little since walking back through the door, and now I just feel blue and blah. I have to walk the dog, fix something for dinner, and maybe even get some teaching prep done for next week, though I haven't decided if I'm going to teach Tuesday yet, or not. And at some point, he'll come back home. And I think things will be better then.