Medford, Oregon June 27, 2015 — Since she lost her vision, Susan has remained stand-offish, edgy, sometimes crying alone in her room. Coming to terms, but it’s hard. She doesn’t want comforting from me. Doesn’t want to be touched or held. Sometimes friendly; sometimes not exactly.
A few weeks ago near the beginning of the month, at the table she said we need to talk. You never really want to hear those words.
The story, made simple, is this: She said she didn’t want to be in a relationship any more. She says she feels like a different person. She says she finds it uncomfortable living in this house with me, as she doesn’t feel she has enough space of her own. I am “too big a personality.” I think that means too noisy, when I’m talking on the phone with clients, always present in the house for I work here. She says it’s too much for her current state of mind.
She’s going to move out just before July first. She’s paid her share of rent for June. Her daughter Saradevi has offered that Susan can live with her, and she’s going. Oddly, Saradevi has recently moved to the teeny-tiny town of Caspar, near Fort Bragg on the Mendocino coast, in a tiny house out in the middle of nowhere.
Since Susan’s catastrophe, which wiped out her artist work and her bookselling business, I have been focusing on my work, to get more clients and income, thinking how to increase our income, for she cannot work and her social-security check is small. But now it seems that’s not to matter much. I love her as intensely as ever. But she doesn’t want me to take care of her.
My belief up to this point was that we would spend the rest of our lives together.
And now, the plan has changed.
Early this week, Saradevi arrived in her car. Susan has prepped things and boxed things rather well for the move, though it didn’t seem like it over the last few weeks. For two days they packed and moved boxes of stuff, then hired a couple of guys and a truck with a dolly to pull Saradevi’s car behind.
The truck got packed. Some furniture, clothes and boxes and books, pictures from the wall, canned goods and kitchen things.
They got in and drove away.
I stood in the front yard, and watched the truck as it grew smaller, receding around the curve of the road, and then it was gone.
I’m on my own, now.
Goodbye, Susan.
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