A woman asks her boyfriend what is wrong. He says "nothing." She can tell something is bothering him, but he has already gone quiet, and the conversation is over before it started.
I was standing in my neighbor's driveway, holding a casserole dish she'd lent me three weeks earlier, when her daughter walked out of the house. I opened my mouth to say hello, and the name simply wasn't there. Not on the tip of my tongue. Not hovering in the back of my mind. Just gone. I smiled and said, "Hey, sweetie," like I was addressing a toddler instead of a twenty-year-old I'd known since she was in kindergarten. She didn't seem to notice. But I did. I drove home wondering what was wrong with me.
My friend Clara sat across from me at a coffee shop and said something I have heard from too many women. "He is great when things are easy. He is funny. He remembers what I like. He texts me good morning. But the second I try to talk about us, he disappears. Not physically. Emotionally. He is right there, but he is not there."
I used to think silence was the problem. That if my husband and I just talked more, everything would sort itself out. But we did talk. Every evening, sitting across from each other at the kitchen table, swapping details about work and the kids and what needed picking up from the store. And still, nothing changed.