The second conversation is far harder, now that the emotion has cleared from her voice and its clear how far she has moved on, come to terms with me, clear that she let me go three months ago and has not much more to say.
Things are much clearer now, how hard the ground has become, and she is here because she loves me, to help me, but she has moved on and some things will never come again except in memory. But she knows about Barb and wants to help me through.
We each try to joke, and accidentally cut the other deeply. The connection is crappy and everything is that much harder for the repeating, I cannot raise my voice with my guests in the next room, cannot help but struggle with the words, cannot stop the tears when they come, either. The connection cuts out moments after she makes a particularly misjudged joke about marriage, and I am left to wonder if she hung up. Dear God, how I despise the Korean phone system.
I wish you had understood you could have asked me.
-I needed to come to this decision on my own.
The ground is hard, the future faint and thin and remote and beyond imagining now, for I have misjudged and not been given the whole picture, and been guilty of the faintest optimism at the worst possible time. The accommodation was made years ago, and it was she who had accommodated me. I think of straws, and like a drowning man, I cannot stop my hands from reaching for them, cannot stop. And she, gently but firmly, must turn even these aside, like holding down a man in a seizure.
It is hard, but necessary, there can be nothing now but truth, and the time for illusions and white lies is long past, long gone.
We will salvage what we can.
-Yes, we will.
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