When You Learn The Signs

You don’t have to be clairvoyant or psychic to ‘know’ what happens ‘next’ when you can read the signs.

When you are alert, when you are quiet and listen and notice, you get as much information as if someone wrote you a message.

I had visited some folks and when I returned home and pondered, I wrote a short story, a ‘fiction’ story about the husband being tossed out of the house by the wife.

When I wrote the story the husband and wife were living together and, in his mind, there wasn’t a hint of problems.

About three years after publication, everything I wrote came to pass, almost as if following a script.

How?

I. Friends

All of the friends of the couple were her friends.  All of those, including his own brother, were unfriended.  Everyone who was in the circle, came there through the wife.   Her  friends, her friends husband and wives were now ‘his’ friends.

No, they weren’t.

II. Silence

In real relationships there are always arguments.    This is because each party has ‘baggage’.    Each party wants the other to agree, each party tries to convince the other that their choice is correct, and they care about each other to the extent everything matters.

In this one, the wife never argued, never discussed, she did what she wanted.  What he said meant nothing.  I recall drinking coffee with her and he standing there saying; “I thought we agreed we weren’t going to drink coffee.”  She didn’t answer.

When people don’t answer it is not agreement, it is contempt.

III  Secrecy

Each day the husband got the child ready for school, the wife looked about herself and left.  Each afternoon she came home, took a large goblet of wine and went into the bathroom for over an hour to bathe.   The husband would arrive  later with the child, whom he would tend.   The wife would wrap herself in a blanket and watch television alone in another room.

The husband did not know the wife drank.    She shared nothing with him.  When he was not home she could talk on the phone to her friends, but when he was home, she held her secrets under her silence.

IV  Nights Out

Every Thursday she went on a ‘girl’s night out’ with her friends.   She would dress and go in silence.  She would come home when she came home.  There was no discussion about where she went, who she saw, what she did. If he asked her; “Have a nice time?”  She’d nod.

It was clear to me that this woman’s life was outside of this house and that he knew nothing about it, in fact he had no idea that she had a life.

I saw all this and wrote a story, and published it.

Two years later, there was an upheaval, and they lost the house they lived in, she moved in with the child with ‘friends’  he was on the street, eventually taken in by his brother, eventually moving into his own flat.  He spent as much time with the child as he was allowed.

It was clear to me that there was no relationship.  The wife had her ‘program’ and when it reached a specific point, she was putting her husband out the door.

All the signs were there