Redacted out of affection.

I have faithfully recorded every adventure from the past four years; I could not, in the end, be unfaithful to myself.

Those who seek it may still read between the lines.

June 2026 – Listen Here

There is something profoundly sorrowful in discovering that a woman’s body may know the truth long before her heart possesses the courage to name it.

I had always imagined love would perish dramatically, amid thunder, tears, and the mournful tolling of funeral bells. I never considered that it might simply grow cold; that one day the touch which had once made every nerve sing might instead feel distant and unfamiliar, as though it belonged to someone I had known in another lifetime.

I never believed I would reach that place with Jack.

For two and a half years he had been woven through the fabric of my existence. His laughter had lived within my soul, his voice within my evenings, and his body had once awakened such joy within mine that I could hardly imagine a future in which I did not hunger for him. I had loved him with the peculiar ferocity only certain women possess – the sort of devotion that does not merely open its hands but lays its very heart upon the altar and calls the sacrifice joy.

Yet love, I would eventually learn, is not always sufficient to bear the entire weight of a life built between two people. 

What grieves me most now is not that our final intimate moment was unhappy.

It is that my body knew it was over.

And I forced it to continue anyway.

There remains a peculiar shame in that memory, a sense that I betrayed something sacred within myself. It still tears at the remaining fragments of my heart, because not that long ago, I had promised myself I would never again silence my own refusal for the sake of a man’s desire. Yet that evening, I did. 

It had been a Wednesday. The year had already been long and difficult, and I had carried its fatigue for so many weeks that I hardly recognized the burden anymore. Weariness had become another garment I carried upon my body, as comforting as my favorite office cardigan and nearly as constant as my sapphire hair. 

I had risen before dawn, as I always did, and exercised while the sky remained dark beyond the windows before enduring an entire nine-hour workday spent answering questions, solving problems, and remembering what everyone else had forgotten. 

Then I had returned home to gather up the endless invisible labors that the world deposits so casually into women’s hands – the bills, the reminders, the laundry, the small domestic rituals that somehow hold an entire household together.

I kissed my Littles goodbye and sent them to their father.

By dinner time, I had become hollowed out in that familiar way only mothers seem to understand, as though all the strength I possessed had already been expended in service of other people. 

I remember standing alone in the apartment for the briefest of moments before he arrived. The rooms had fallen unnaturally hushed after the departure of the Littles, though traces of them remained everywhere: a forgotten cup upon the table, shoes abandoned near the door, the adorable disarray of a family forever departing and returning. The dishes waited in the sink, the laundry slumped within its basket, and tomorrow’s obligations already seemed to be gathering impatiently at the threshold. 

With both hands braced against the kitchen counter, I found myself seized by a sudden and desperate longing to remain entirely alone. 

The thought saddened me. There had been a time when the distant growl of his Jeep entering the complex would have sent a little current of anticipation through me. I would have recognized his footsteps upon the stairs and hurried to the door, already beaming before he reached it. That evening, however, the familiar sounds awakened no joy. I felt curiously numb, yet beneath that deadened surface anger moved through me like venom entering the blood, hot, stealthy, and already seeking the heart. 

Jack, by contrast, arrived with all the ardor of a sailor restored at last to shore, his affection abundant and his longing undisguised. Ordinarily, I would have met such devotion with equal enthusiasm. That evening, I could summon only a pale imitation of welcome. 

I was already preparing dinner. He leaned against the counter, watching as I moved between the cutting board, the cupboards, and the stove, before offering to help. 

I wanted to answer sharply. He could have collected dinner on his way to me. He could have arrived carrying something warm in his hands and said that I had done enough for one day. He could have considered the routine dawn workout, the nine hours at the office, the children I had kissed and sent away, and all the unseen pieces of myself I had already distributed among other people. More than assistance, I wanted evidence that he valued my time, that he perceived how relentlessly I poured from myself and wished, for once, to replenish rather than receive from me. 

Instead, his offer required me to become a supervisor within my own kitchen. I would have needed to explain where everything belonged, how the vegetables ought to be cut, which pan to use, and what still needed doing. Experience had taught me that his assistance often created more labor than it relieved, and so I declined, perhaps with more edge in my voice than the words themselves deserved.

The true wound was not that he could not cook particularly well. It was that I was weary of managing, directing, remembering, organizing, and anticipating for everyone around me. I did not want to assign him a task and then watch over its completion. I wanted him to recognize the burden before I was forced to describe it. I wanted my exhaustion to matter without first having to compose an argument for why it should. 

At the very heart of all my frustrations lay one devastatingly simple truth. I did not wish to manage another person. I wanted a partner. I wanted rest. 

And so I continued with the familiar evening ritual. I finished preparing the meal, arranged it upon our plates, carried everything to the table, and afterward returned to the sink while warm water streamed over my aching hands. Jack settled comfortably upon the couch as I moved about the apartment completing the final little tasks: cheese back to the fridge, adjusting the thermostat, and lighting a few candles for ambience.

None of this was extraordinary. I had sat in his home while he prepared spaghetti or burgers for me, and there had been evenings when each of us cared for the other without resentment. That was precisely what made the moment so difficult to explain.

Over time, however, disappointments, forgotten promises, deferred responsibilities, and troubling fears had slowly accumulated, somehow continuing to find their way into my hands.

Each incident appeared almost weightless when examined alone. Together, they had become a mountain beneath which something sacred in me was being gradually crushed.

Deep within my body, resentment had been feeding for months. It was no languid python, heavy and merely constricting, but a venomous serpent hidden beneath the undergrowth of our affection. Each unfulfilled promise had nourished it; every responsibility I unwillingly inherited had warmed its blood. So gradual had its growth been that I failed to recognize it until it lay coiled beneath my breastbone, its fangs resting against my heart, poised to poison even the gentlest touch.

Resentment is perhaps born not merely from disappointment, but from hope repeatedly deferred. Each small hurt might have been bearable had I not continually believed relief was just over the next hill. 

I seemed less a lover than a wife, though not in any tender or cherished sense of the word. I felt like the bleakest caricature of one: the woman who worked, remembered, prepared, served, and cleared away while a man waited relaxed and at ease for her to finish.

And it was not a compliment.

We ate together in the living room, conversing about our respective weeks, exchanging the small and ordinary details that sought to fill the void between us. Eventually we settled into the cushions and resumed an episode of House of the Dragon, the flickering light from the television dancing across the room. 

I welcomed the distraction, grateful for something that might occupy the evening and spare me, for a little while longer, the labor of witty conversation. 

Yet as I leaned back into the cushions, he shifted into his customary position and draped his arm around me. 

Leaning closer, he buried his face in my hair and murmured that he had missed my scent, missed holding me, missed this.

A strange revulsion passed through me then, so swift and involuntary that I nearly mistook it for illness.

The muscles between my shoulders drew taut. The little furrow between my brows returned of its own accord. My stomach seemed to sink heavily within me, as though I had swallowed some smoldering coal that now rested unpleasantly beneath my ribs.

Every affectionate touch appeared to arrive a fraction too late, reaching for a woman who had already stepped, almost invisibly, beyond its grasp.

He pressed soft kisses above my ear.

I smiled because I knew I ought to.

Yet even that small effort felt disconcertingly performative.

He shifted ever nearer until every possible inch of him touched me, and my entire body reacted as though cornered. My lungs suddenly seemed too small for the air available to them. The warmth of his arm, the weight of his leg against mine, even the gentle pressure of his hand became almost unbearable in their immediacy.

There arose within me an aching desire for space – for the cool far end of the couch, for silence, for solitude, for the simple relief of not being touched at all.

Still, I remained where I was.

Women are taught such peculiar forms of endurance. We become astonishingly skilled at remaining perfectly still while every instinct within us begs to flee. We smile when we wish to weep, offer tenderness when we long for solitude, and learn to silence our own discomfort so completely that eventually we scarcely cease recognizing it ourselves.

I remember thinking, with a kind of growing horror, that I felt nothing at all. There was no familiar quickening beneath my ribs, no soft anticipation, no bright little spark of joy at his nearness. Worse still was the dawning realization that I did not wish for him to touch me and, more unspeakable yet, that I did not wish for him to be in my apartment at all.

The understanding settled over me with all the merciless certainty of winter. My heart seemed to plunge into icy water as I sat there motionless beside him, suddenly aware that some essential and beloved thing had already begun slipping beyond my reach.

Yet even then, grief rose more swiftly than anger.

Because this was Jack.

The man whose arrival had once filled me with anticipation, whose touch had once awakened every joyful and feral thing within me, the man I still loved despite everything that had accumulated between us.

The tragedy was not that I no longer loved him, but that I could no longer find the woman who had once craved him. 

So I inhaled slowly and attempted to remind myself of our great love, the relationship others had so often envied, the bright and faithful fire that had once burned between us with such astonishing intensity. Surely this was only exhaustion. Surely I had merely become overwhelmed by a rollercoaster year. Surely, if I could stop thinking for one evening and remember who we had once been to one another, everything would right itself.

I had spent months telling myself that this season was only temporary. That the debts would lessen, his circumstances would improve, and the fears I carried would eventually grow quieter. I did not remain because I was happy. I remained because I kept remembering how deeply in love we had once been and believing we might yet return there. Love makes historians of us all, forever searching the present for evidence that the past might one day return. 

I believed if I could endure a little longer, if I could be patient a little longer, eventually the scales would right themselves. We would once again stand beside one another, each carrying our proper share of responsibility. 

I searched for my Inner Goddess, the succubus who had once flown to the door at the sound of his knock and jumped into his arms before he had a chance to cross the threshold. I searched for her almost desperately, as though she might still be hidden somewhere within me, merely sleeping beneath all this disappointment and fatigue.

But she did not come.

My body remained entirely silent.

No answering warmth stirred within me, nor did I discover some hidden ember glowing patiently beneath the ashes. I found only a strange stillness, and for the first time I began to wonder whether she had departed long before I noticed her absence. 

When the episode ended, I leaned forward to retrieve my water.

Jack looked at me with that familiar Cheshire grin and said,

“I am ready for you to ravage me!”

Seven harmless words.

Seven ordinary words.

And yet his words slammed into me like an anvil. The request itself was not the wound. It merely drove the venom deeper. 

For one dreadful moment my vision blurred, and I felt those long-poised fangs finally sink deep into my heart. All the accumulated disappointments, fatigue, and long-nursed resentments of the preceding months rushed through me like poison through the bloodstream – hot, bitter, and wholly inevitable.

How fecking dare he!

Another thing.

Another need.

Another hand extended toward a heart already worn threadbare. 

I had given and given and given.

I had given my labor, my time, my energy, my hard-earned dollars. I had mended relationships, turned a house into a home, remembered endlessly, worried endlessly, anticipated endlessly. I rose before dawn, worked a full-time job, put thousands of miles on my car, managed my household, loved my children, loved him, and carried responsibilities both mine and his until there were evenings when I felt so frazzled and threadbare that even the smallest request could bring me to tears. 

And somehow, after all of that, I was still being asked to give more. 

More softness.

More attention.

More reassurance.

More desire.

More of my body.

How fecking dare he. 

How dare he sit beside me with such easy affection, still seeking adoration, still wishing to be seduced, while seeming so entirely unaware of how exhausted I had become.

How could he not see it?

How could he not see how little remained of me?

How could he still be asking for more?

Because intimacy no longer felt like love.

It felt like another obligation added to an already impossible list of obligations. It felt like an expectation placed upon a woman who had not even a single drop remaining for her own parched tongue. 

There was a part of me that wished to weep from sheer depletion and another that wanted to scream in holy wrath.

I did not wish to be touched. I did not wish to perform softness or desire. I did not wish to surrender one more fragment of myself to someone who seemed so utterly content to take and take and take. 

And that realization filled me with a shame I still struggle to articulate, because I found myself feeling anger and depletion toward the man whose happiness had once felt indistinguishable from my own, the man I still loved despite everything. 

The tragedy was not that I no longer loved him. It was that I no longer possessed the strength to continue carrying him.

Love had survived. My desire and hope that change was just on the horizon… had not.

I struggled to keep my voice gentle, though I could feel rage seeping from every pore like beads of sweat.

He laughed softly and explained that he had merely meant it as a joke. Usually I was the one with the voracious appetite. Plus, he pointed out, our time together was always so short, and we best make the most of it!

And perhaps he was right…

Once, I would have climbed eagerly into his lap before dinner had even cooled, laughing at my own impatience. Yet I could not find that woman anywhere. 

We went back and forth for some time. He attempted to retract the remark, though I knew he truly desired intimacy. Monday felt far away, he reminded me, with a thoroughly plaintive expression that made me feel simultaneously guilty and profoundly weary. I could see that he wanted touch, wanted security, wanted me to become once more the woman who had always met his desire with her own. 

Everything within me recoiled, yet I heard myself speak all the same. 

“Fine. Come on.”

Even as the words left my mouth, everything inside me screamed in objection, yet I lacked the courage for the larger conversation. The promissory note had become a monstrous and silent thing in my mind, standing squarely between us in every shared moment, so obvious to me that I could not understand how he failed to see it. Ten days had already passed beyond its due date, and with each passing day that he failed to remember it, I felt something within me dim a little further.

I kept waiting for him to mention it of his own accord, to apologize, to demonstrate that it weighed upon him as heavily as it did upon me. I did not want to remind him. I did not wish to become another woman carrying yet another responsibility for him, another woman forced to remember on behalf of a man who had forgotten. More than the money itself, I longed for some evidence that I mattered enough for him to remember without prompting.

As we walked toward the bedroom, I felt dissociation settle over me, as if I had suddenly become a spectator to my own life. My limbs felt heavy, as though I were moving beneath deep water, while my throat tightened painfully and my jaw ached from clenching it so fiercely. I could feel my pulse beating against my ribs in uneven, unhappy little drums. 

Everything within me was resisting with the desperate urgency of a creature being led somewhere it no longer wished to go. 

I undressed and continued moving through the motions, already beginning the familiar work of persuading myself that my own wishes mattered less. 

Even as he repeatedly assured me that we did not have to do this, I could feel the hollowness in the offer. His desire was abundantly clear and painfully visible between us. He wanted me. He wished for closeness, for reassurance, for intimacy, and I found myself thinking with terrible resignation that I could do this one thing for him. It would make him happy, and for so many years I had believed that keeping those I loved content was simply another name for love itself. 

And so I ignored myself entirely.

That is the part I mourn most fiercely now. Not that I no longer desired him, nor even that our love had changed, but that I betrayed my own body. Every instinct within me had cried out in protest, and I overruled it all the same. 

Lying beneath him, I closed my eyes, turned my face away, and performed. 

What else can one call it?

I offered merely an imitation of passion, a ghost clothed in the garments of desire. 

My hands remained clenched over his back because I could not bear to caress what I had once loved.

Every movement seemed to hurt; my muscles remained rigid and unyielding, my own body had become a clenched fist. 

Rather than heed my body’s warning, I reached instead for the little bottle of oil we had seldom needed before. It felt like another betrayal, another sorrowful sign that my body had already retreated from him. 

The heat of him felt oppressive, and his weight, once so beloved, now seemed imprisoning. 

I became acutely aware of every point of contact between us and found myself longing only for space, for air, for distance. 

Meanwhile my mind raced with every accumulated grievance: promissory notes, debts, conversations repeated until my voice had grown hoarse, and the endless fears that had nested beneath my breastbone for months – the fear that his circumstances, his debts, and the consequences of his decisions might one day become mine to carry. 

So I suggested a change of position, turning onto my hands and knees with my face averted; a position that might hasten completion, conceal my expression, and perhaps allow us both to escape this strange and sorrowful imitation of intimacy.

I tried.

God help me, I truly tried.

I tried for him, for us, for the years we had shared, for the woman I had once been and could no longer seem to find.

Yet there was no spark to summon, no dormant longing stirred, but only exhaustion, bitterness, and resentment so pervasive that it seemed to have settled into my bones.

I found myself having to remember to sigh, to perform desire, to offer an almost theatrical imitation of passion. 

When he asked me to turn back and face him, a fresh wave of dread rose within me, because I knew then that I could no longer disguise my expression.

A woman’s body may lie. Her mouth may smile. She may perform affection with astonishing skill.

But her eyes are honest creatures, and I feared mine had already begun telling the truth.

So when he finally stopped and softly asked what was wrong, the question struck me with almost unbearable absurdity. For one horrible moment, I nearly pushed him away. Instead, I could only stare at the man I had loved with every fiber of my being. How could he still seem surprised by wounds I had been pointing toward for months? 

He withdrew then and brushed a knuckle across my cheek, but the touch felt strangely foreign, almost like the kindness of a stranger. I slipped from the bed, cleaned myself, dressed, and then, dragged from me like some reluctant beast, the words finally began to spill forth.

I spoke again of every disappointment, every hurt, every sleepless night spent worrying for him. I remember shaking the promissory note beneath his nose and asking how he had forgotten that it was not only due but already overdue. The realization that he had not cared enough to remember wounded me more deeply than I can adequately describe. The debts owed not only to me but to my friends. His precarious health. My endless concern and the ceaseless vigilance of loving someone who seemed forever one poor decision away from disaster. 

Yet even then I tried to keep my voice measured. I could hear the old warnings whispering within me: do not be your mother; do not become too much; do not become a volcano.

My chest burned, though no longer with heartbreak. This was fury, bright and ruinous, climbing steadily upward like molten metal beneath my ribs until my throat felt swollen with all the things I had spent months attempting to say gently. I dug my nails into my palms until crimson crescents formed there, finding the sharp sting uncannily preferable, because physical pain is at least an honest thing. It remains where it is placed, whereas grief is infinitely more treacherous. It migrates. It becomes heartburn and migraines and exhaustion. It settles beneath the sternum and waits patiently for quiet moments in which to make itself known.

Because by then a far more devastating question had begun unfolding within me. It was not whether I loved him, for I did and perhaps always would. Love had never truly been the issue. The more frightening question was whether desire, once extinguished by disappointment and resentment, could ever be resurrected; whether trust could return, whether admiration could be restored, whether my body could ever again look upon him and feel sufficiently safe to bloom.

Or had something sacred already died between us while I stood stubbornly beside its grave refusing to acknowledge the burial?

And yet I recoiled from the thought, because he was not some passing crush but a man who knew the hidden layers of my soul, and surely this was merely our darkest chapter. Surely there remained some wounded but living thing that might yet be coaxed back into the light. 

He listened patiently and apologized, promising that he did not wish to lose me and that he would fix things. I calmed somewhat then, because I wanted desperately not to resent the man I loved. I told him I needed space, and he agreed readily, assuring me that he understood.

We kissed and embraced, and for a fleeting moment I allowed myself to believe that perhaps he truly had heard me.

Then, as he prepared to leave, he smiled softly and reminded me that he was free Monday and Tuesday should I wish to spend time together.

I felt my body recoil.

Not because it was an unreasonable offer, nor because companionship itself was unwelcome, but because I suddenly understood that we were standing in two entirely different realities.

He believed I merely needed a few days to cool down.

I was contemplating whether our relationship could survive at all. I said I needed space.

He still imagined ordinary tomorrows. More dinners. More evenings together. More opportunities to repair what had been damaged.

I had asked for space in order to determine whether something sacred between us had already died.

Alone, I was staring at the slow accumulation of disappointments, at responsibilities no partner should have to assume, at the quiet and terrible realization that I had begun loving him in increasingly parental ways, that I had spent so long making room for his needs that I had nearly abandoned my own.

I knew then that I would not see him again for quite some time.

Perhaps not ever in the same way.

So I merely offered him a tired smile and wished him a safe drive home.

I think my body understood long before my mind possessed the courage to admit it.

There are few griefs more painful than realizing that the last time you make love to someone rarely announces itself as an ending.

One heart simply continues onward, still believing in tomorrows, while the other stands quietly among the ruins, already beginning to mourn.

It was a farewell.

Only one of us knew it.

And only one of us had already begun to grieve.

Until next time, XO. Elsie