I am growing complacent. Prompts are thrown at me and I am taking the easy way out. I read a cliche, and I answer by spouting a few of my own. Or at least the thinking behind them is unoriginal.

Complacency. I was a good husband. A failure, though, because love was easy. Professor New reminds me time and time again: the easy is often the wrong. The immoral. And because my love was easy, I was therefore living immorally.

I have no blame for myself. It was beautiful. Being this transgressor. Living in the luxurious love we created.

I grew complacent. She grew distant.

From my faithful heathenism, I became first an apostate and second faithless. How does apostasy emerge from heathenism? I accepted that my indulgent love was an aberration, that love must not be special. That it was the last vestige in me of the human desire for order and purpose through faith, as ideas of god always struck strikingly false. That this vestige was finally stripped also. That I had merely succumbed to a very human delirium, and that, happy though it was, it had no place in my life which had already been dedicated solely to living truthfully.

(My commitment to truth is no faith. I won't say that 'the truth shall set you free,' or 'truth is the greatest good.' Rather, like Thoreau in the following bastardized quote, I only want "to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." To enjoy life if it be good, "to suck out the marrow," and if it be bad, "to publish that meanness" to the world.)

We separated. I moved on. Then I found myself stardust in a crowded galaxy. I found some truths about myself: that I am resilient, that I enjoy the company of strangers, and that I am not as logical as I try to be. I learned that one absurd or irrational thing in my life can keep me at my most logical and clear headed. I learned that love is absurd. That love is irrational. And that I only felt love with one person.

When I say that I moved on, I did not mean that I moved on to anything better. Not yet, anyway. I sure have received a hefty dose of truth, though. Now I am bowing before my wife, but not like the uxorious lover I was for a decade. The vulnerability (irrational, absurd) is an honest communication of my discovery. That I want her in my life. But I will live without that love if it is too late.

Suck the marrow, or publish the meanness. At least there was marrow to be had.