The Pilot's Wife

To leave, after all, was not the same as being left.

Sometimes, she thought, courage was simply a matter of putting one foot in front of another and not stopping.

To be relieved of love, she thought, was to give up a terrible burden.

But how do you ever know that you know a person?

I loved him," Muire said. "We were in love." As if that were enough.

Odd, she thought, how intensely you knew a person, or thought you did, when you were in love - soaked, drenched in love - only to discover later that perhaps you didn't know that person quite as well as you had imagined. Or weren't quite as well known as you had hoped to be. In the beginning, a lover drank in every word and gesture and then tried to hold on to that intensity for as long as possible. But inevitable, if two people were together long enough, that intensity had to wane.

And she thought then how strange it was that disaster—the sort of disaster that drained the blood from your body and took the air out of your lungs and hit you again and again in the face—could be at times, such a thing of beauty.

The difficulty lay with the mind accommodating itself to the notion of the plane, with all its weight, defying gravity, staying aloft. She understood the aerodynamics of flight, could comprehend the laws of physics that made flight possible, but her heart, at the moment, would have none of it. Her heart knew the plane could fall out of the sky.

No matter how often Kathryn observed the phenomenon, she found it hard to comprehend: the way nothing could remain as it had been, not a house that was falling down, not a woman's face that had once been beautiful, not childhood, not a marriage, not love. You have to let this happen to you, he said quietly. It has its own momentum. But how do you ever know that you know a person? Aren't we enough? she asks again. Odd she thought, how a fact, seen one way, was one thing. And then, seen from a different angle, was something else entirely. Or perhaps not so odd. Of all people, he said, this should not have happened to you. She thought about the impossibility of ever knowing another person. About the fragility of the constructs people make. A marriage, for example. A family. To be relieved of love, she thought, was to give up a terrible burden.

The warmth of him always, even on the coldest of nights, as though his inner furnace burned extravagantly.

her skin, which she has hardly

Es decir, ellos, como todas las otras parejas que ha conocido, viven en un estado de suave declive, de convertirse, de modo sutil y sin torturas, cada día en algo menos de lo que eran el día anterior.

Night would settle in like slow blindness, sucking the color from the trees and the low sky and the rocks and the frozen grass and the frost white hydrangeas until there was nothing left in the window but her own reflection.