When I fell in love, I felt an immense weight rise from my shoulders. I told my then to be wife this. I told her, “When I fell in love with you I suddenly knew how to breathe and that all my time up to that moment I fell in love I had been suffocating. I had been living without breath. It was as if I had been underwater, sucking for air. Falling in love with you was like exploding up from the surface.”
And so when Ben told me he had fallen in love with a woman who was not his wife and that he had begun seeing her, I asked him how his breathing was going.
“My breathing?” he said. “My breathing is just fine. I was late online with her this weekend, chatting on Facebook. I kept telling my wife I had work and that I would be to bed soon and that she should just go ahead and go to bed, and then we chatted, chatted in secret.”
“Did she go to bed? Does she suspect that you’re seeing someone else?”
“Of course, of course,” Ben said in his unhesitating manner. “But does she know, know for sure? Does she wonder sometimes? Does she imagine me staring out hotel windows? Does she imagine me opening the door and letting a lover in? Does she imagine what I might say, the kinds of words we share together and online, what we feel when our hands . . . You understand. It’s very complicated.”
“But how is your breathing?” I asked again. “You say you’re in love with another woman. You chat with her. You meet her at hotels. Tell me, do you feel as if the air you’re breathing is like something new, as if for years your lungs have done nothing but taken up space in your chest, and, suddenly, in love, a great and invisible bird has unclenched itself from your shoulders?”
“My breathing. You ask about my breathing. Alright, yes,” Ben said. “I feel like I’m breathing the air inside a freezer.”
