Family Forum / Marriage / Divorce / February 2007

~She~ hated him, asked him to leave. So he put a plastic bag over his head
and taped it around his neck, and he left.

He drove to work with the bag on his head, hardly breathing, barely seeing
the traffic. He clocked his hours. He spoke to co-workers, drank his coffee,
presented data to the managers, lifted weights at the gym, flirted with the
pretty engineer from Nicaragua who sits down the aisle from him.

Yet each morning he woke with the plastic bag tightly wound to his neck.

Women woke up next to him, kissed him through the bag. Women said they loved
him. He said he loved them back.

Still, he couldn't breathe, not one breath. All because ~she~ hated him.

He coached his son's soccer. Flirted with the single moms. He pretended his
vision wasn't clouded, that he could see the one mom's lean outline, that he
could smell the cut grass, that his words didn't stick to the inside of the
bag in a puddle of spit.

For years he woke each morning and looked in the mirror and shaved through
the bag, washed his hair through the bag, brushed his teeth and drank his
beer through the bag. For years he suffocated inside that bag.

Then he met her. She may not last, he knows it. He's kissed enough women to
realize nothing is sacred, that first and second and third dates don't mean
there will be a fourth. But he saw the air that night.

Have you ever seen the air?

For over three hours they sat, talking about nothing, and for three hours
the bag was off his head. He smelled her. Tasted her words. Patiently
watched her lips move without kissing them, knowing he would feel them this
time, taste flesh rather than plastic if they ever kissed.

He breathed. He breathed and breathed and breathed. He left the bag on the
floor beneath the table.

And later, when he saw ~her~, he breathed still more, smelled ~her~, and
realized ~she~ didn't hate him at all.

He realized hate had nothing to do with it.

- Saul