Found

Chapter 37

I used to hide in the bathtub when I needed a timeout. I actually still do that. It’s the one place I can go where everyone leaves me alone for at least an hour.

During lockdown, the whole world seemed to discover all kinds of home projects. People baked bread, they remodeled kitchens, they planted gardens and painted their whole house. Apparently, I decided I was going to do all three hundred hobbies at once. I painted rooms, rearranged furniture, still worked at Baycreek, mowed grass, hauled mulch, planted vegetables, and attempted to grow enough food to survive the apocalypse despite having absolutely no idea what I was doing. Most of my garden ended up looking like a tangled mess that had quickly  gotten out of control, but I kept trying anyway.

By the time evening rolled around, I was absolutely exhausted.

One summer night, after the boys were asleep and the house had finally gone quiet, I walked upstairs and started filling the bathtub. The oversized jacuzzi tub became my sanctuary during those years. I poured in bubble bath, lit a candle, and waited while steam slowly fogged the mirrors. The water was so hot I could barely stand to put my foot in it. When the tub finally filled, I eased myself down into it and leaned back against the jets with a long sigh.

For the first time all day, nobody needed anything from me.

The dog was settled. The boys were asleep. Dinner was cleaned up. Whatever wasn’t finished could wait until tomorrow.

I closed my eyes and let my mind wander.

Somewhere between the candlelight, the hot water, and the silence, I found myself thinking about Paul.

By then, so much time had passed that he didn’t always feel entirely real anymore. COVID had made the world feel smaller. Every day looked a lot like the day before it. Home. Work. Home again. News reports. Grocery pickups. Home improvement projects. Repeat. Life had become so focused on surviving the present that parts of my past started to feel almost imaginary.

Paul was one of them.

That probably sounds odd considering how important he had once been to me, but life has a way of burying things. Years had passed. Children had grown. Businesses had been built. Marriages had struggled. Entire chapters of my life had unfolded. Somewhere along the way, those memories got tucked onto a shelf and left there.

Never forgotten, but buried beneath everything else.

The truth is, I missed him.

I missed his presence. His steadiness. I missed the conversations. I missed talking to somebody who understood me without requiring a twenty-minute explanation first. I missed the ease of it. I missed having someone who saw me as more than a wife, a mother, a business owner, or a problem solver. And, quite honestly, I missed the intimacy.

By then, my husband and I hadn’t had a real physical relationship in years. If I’m telling the truth, probably not since my youngest was conceived. Whatever intimacy had once existed between us slowly disappeared underneath addiction, resentment, paranoia, fear, emotional distance, and eventually psychosis. You don’t survive accusations like the ones he made against me and still crawl into bed feeling emotionally safe afterward.

That part of our marriage died long before the marriage itself finally did.

People act like loneliness is purely emotional, but it isn’t. Loneliness becomes physical too. You miss being held. You miss softness. You miss someone reaching for you without tension attached to it. You miss being looked at in a way that makes you feel loved instead of tolerated.

Paul had always given me some version of that.

That was part of what made him so dangerous emotionally.

He lived in Melbourne, Australia while I lived in Ohio. The distance made the relationship feel contained somehow. Safe. Almost protected from real life. We existed solely through words, and people underestimate how powerful words can become when two people spend years slowly handing each other pieces of themselves.

Especially lonely people.

Especially people trapped inside lives they no longer recognize.

I remember sitting there in the tub staring at the candle and wondering what had happened to him. Was it even real? Part of me felt like I had made him up.

I still had access to the old email account we used to write each other through. Every now and then I thought about opening it, but I never did. Part of me wanted the memories preserved exactly as they were. We had written to each other for a long time, but, slowly, like all things, it had faded until I had quit looking for him in my inbox.

And if I’m being completely honest, there was another reason too; I was ashamed of what a spectacle my life had become. Everything became so complicated, so difficult and explaining it to anyone seemed humiliating .

Life had not exactly gone according to plan.

My husband used to throw “just a bartender” at me during arguments. Not once or twice. Over and over again. It didn’t matter that I managed bars. It didn’t matter that I ran businesses. It didn’t matter that I was raising children and somehow holding everything together while the wheels were falling off around us.

Eventually those words settle into your bones.

Just a bartender.

Paul was educated, successful, well-traveled, thoughtful, and living halfway around the world in a country I had never even been to before.  Every time I thought about reaching out, some insecure part of me wondered what he could possibly see in me.

I never fully understood it.

I just knew he always seemed genuinely happy to hear from me.

So that night, sitting in a bathtub surrounded by bubbles and candlelight, I picked up my phone and opened the old email account.

I expected to find memories.

What I found instead stopped me cold.

My intention was to  scroll through old messages and reread little pieces of a life that felt like it belonged to somebody else. I wanted to remember conversations I had forgotten and stories I hadn’t thought about in years. I wanted to remember the tiny snapshots of a younger version of myself preserved inside an inbox.

I typed in my password and to my surprise there were many new messages. I only used this email address for him. All of these messages were from Paul. My Paul.

For a second I just stared at the screen.

Then I opened one.

And another.

And another.

My stomach dropped.

While I had been busy living my life, Paul had been writing to me.

There were Christmas messages every year.

Merry Christmas, Rach.

Thinking of you and hoping life is treating you kindly.

I hope the boys are doing well.

I hope you’re happy.

There were small check-ins and little notes asking how I was doing. Updates about his life. Questions about mine.

I sat there reading them while the water slowly cooled around me.

Every Christmas.

Every year.

He never missed one.

The further I read, the worse I felt.There were no accusations. No guilt trips. No resentment. Just this  consistency that somehow made me feel even worse.

He had simply kept showing up.

Then I reached the last email. It was about a year old by the time I found it. I remember reading it once. Then reading it again. Then a third time.

One sentence hit me so hard I physically covered my mouth.

“I guess I’ve lost you.”

I just sat there staring at those words. The thing was, he hadn’t. Not really. He hadn’t lost me. I had simply disappeared inside my own life.

Somewhere between raising children, building a business, surviving addiction, surviving psychosis, managing a household, navigating a marriage that was completely falling apart, and trying to hold everything together, entire pieces of me had slipped beneath the surface.

Reading those emails felt less like reconnecting with another person and more like stumbling across evidence that a different version of myself had once existed.

By the time I reached the end of the email, I was crying. The tears just fell down my face. I was crying because somebody I cared about had spent years reaching for me while I was busy surviving.

And I never even knew.

I climbed out of the tub, wrapped myself in a towel, and sat on the edge of the tub with my phone in my hand.

How do you explain years?

How do you summarize everything that happened without unloading the full insanity of your life onto someone?

I started typing. And, deleted it. Started again. Deleted that too. Eventually I settled on the truth.

I told him I was sorry. I told him I hadn’t seen the emails. I told him he hadn’t lost me. I told him I was still here. I had always been right here. And, I admitted to him that my life had kind of eaten me alive, but, I had survived. I even told him about the tears streaming down my face as I finally answered him.

A few minutes later I pressed send.

What I didn’t realize was that a single message was about to reopen a chapter of my life that I thought had ended years earlier.