It’s like the glass floor beneath my feet has spiderweb’d into a million stray lines that, at any moment, could splinter to their end and fall away completely.
I haven’t written in forever. I post on twitter occasionally, but I didn’t take the time to transfer them here like I had planned to. I didn’t write when life got really amazing and Chris was the embodiment of all I always knew he could be–better than the picture I had in mind even. And I didn’t write when mental illness took him from me–for the weeks of his anxiety at a level I had yet to experience from him, and he hadn’t experienced himself in over a decade; for the endless loop of anger and confrontation I didn’t know was possible to direct at me; for the impatience I didn’t know he could direct at our children; for the revolving anxiety and depression and paranoia and insomnia; for the random moments of cognizance that dripped with apology and hope that he could come back to himself by sheer will.
And then he was himself again. I was cautious, but I could tell I had him back. That it was the real him. For a bit. For a couple days. For a few.
And then yesterday it wasn’t him again. And I cried. And then he took a walk with our son and they had a good time. After they got home, he texted to say it felt like I was upset with him. I told him I felt on edge from our conversation earlier. He said he didn’t know what I was talking about. He didn’t text back more because he had gotten very tired (as one would after a long day of hard labor) and he fell asleep.
After he got up, he got almost belligerently, unreasonably upset about his family (his parents and sister) and couldn’t be calmed about it. Then told me he still didn’t know what I was talking about in our text conversation. I recounted our conversation from earlier in the day and he stared at me blankly.
He has no memory of that conversation.
And so here I am now, writing. Because I feel lost and this is how I find me. I love my husband like nobody’s business. I don’t know what to do. He needs to go to the doctor, but I can’t make him. We have vacation coming up in a couple days. I don’t know when the floor under me is going to shatter further. I don’t want to survive him slipping away from me. Yet I’d have no choice.
I am terrified.