Malcolm came last weekend and offered to start bringing stuff home, but I don't want to live one day longer than I have to in an apt. without books, boots, and photographs on the wall. He'll be back again on Friday, and then we can start to box stuff and break this place down. And once again, I can't wait until he walks in the door like a mirage with his kind eyes and shy smile, like he wants to ask me out but can't quite get up the courage, even though I'm gonna say yes. I thought he'd never ask! These entrances and exits feel fresh, sweet, both of us vulnerable and expectant, eager.

Still, it's not unpleasant living apart from your spouse, in separate abodes. When M and I split up a few years ago, I had just found an apt. I loved in the Cotton Mill, but I panicked, pulled up, e mailed him, asked him to come over, quickly, so we could talk, and reconcile. I'm happy to be back in a better, more peaceful version of my marriage, but I always regretted not moving into that brick-walled, sun-slashed 2-bedroom. Because I never lived one day alone when I wasn't in a relationship. Never expected I would. Someone skipped over the lesson about how you don't have to be with a man to be whole. How maybe you want to smarten up and act like more than a hole. I was fearful about living away from M, but afraid to live with him. The rush of love and doubt I felt that day in the FQ when I asked him to come back is one of the clearest, scariest, most powerful moments of my life. I knew how to want, but not how to ask for what I wanted.

Houston has shown me something about staying alive inside a marriage, getting in the car and driving through neighborhoods like you live there, learning the streets, venturing outside the loop, gaining ground you get to keep, and having a pretty nice time with yourself. (Out of the gutter, minds!) I've had another chance at the independence I always imagined but never realized, without the pain of maybe-divorcing and ripping your kid in half. The isolation's sad, and there were days when I couldn't wait for A to go to school so I could take a nap, covers over my head, or when I forgot to leave the house, or when I watched eight hours of back-to-back 24s from the seasons I missed. But also comfortable. You make your own days, you fry onions and cook chili, you write your novel, you read newspapers on the internet, you eat butterscotch pudding, you download 585 free songs and forget to take off the headphones two hours after the music stops, another pudding, still you know you and M are connected to the mothership, just on different tethers. And that this variation of your marriage has a beginning, a middle, and no end.