Beyond This Time

Tammy called in the late afternoon and asked if she could come over, so we could spend the missile attack together. She still wasn’t used to being alone and was more frightened than ever. Well, I could understand that. It hadn’t even been a year since she mustered her courage and told Danny that enough was enough—their marriage of twenty-seven years was over.

I encouraged her. I thought she was doing the right thing. She’d wasted too much of her life waiting for things to be good. The thing was, good wasn’t something Danny knew how to do, at least not when it came to other people. To him, ‘good’ was people telling him, What a badass you are, Danny, what a fantastic artist, look at this stunning exhibition you put together. Sometimes, on the days when he got a good newspaper review, he could also be good to her, dizzy with elation. But most of the time it wasn’t like that at all.

(I chuckle to myself. This story isn’t about him, and yet Danny’s presence sneaks in between the words, as stubborn as lichen even under my fingertips.) My point is that Tammy had just spent twenty-seven years living in a couple, and today, this historic day when the radio announced that Iran was launching a missile attack, she was all alone.

“It’s hard to be alone,” she said over the phone. As if I didn’t know.

I get it. Even if it was shit most of the time, at least it was shit endured with another person. And anyway, her shit was the camouflaged kind, wrapped in shiny paper. They had friends to hang...