I’ve been thinking about a girl I knew in 1987 for the entire thirty-one years of my marriage. Not constantly, because that would almost be easier to explain. Instead, she appears for a few seconds at a time, several times a week, and then disappears before I can even understand why she was there. Sometimes I see her in the car at a red light, and sometimes her face appears while my wife is telling me about her day. I have never looked her up or tried to find her. I deliberately kept her unreal because I knew that making her a real person would force me to admit how much of my marriage I’d spent comparing reality to a memory.
Four seconds doesn’t sound like much until you multiply it by three decades. I’ve never calculated how much of my life those moments add up to, and I’ve never wanted to. My wife has never had a chance against this woman because she isn’t actually competing with a person. She’s competing with a version of someone who exists entirely inside my head, untouched by age, disappointment, arguments, or ordinary life. I told myself that because I’d never contacted her, I’d never done anything wrong. But the truth is that I protected the fantasy precisely by refusing to learn anything that might make her human.
Last month my wife was cleaning out a box in the garage and found a photograph from 1987. There were about eleven people in it, and I hadn’t seen the picture in years. She sat at the kitchen table with the photograph and started asking who everyone was. Then she pointed at one face and asked whether that was the girl I’d known back then. I froze because I had never told her enough about that girl for her to recognize her. My wife looked at me and said, “You’ve never said her name, but I’ve seen that face before.”
I asked her where, and she said she’d noticed the same face in an old photograph I’d kept tucked inside a book for years. She hadn’t confronted me because she assumed there was an innocent explanation. Then she asked me the question I’d spent thirty-one years avoiding: whether I’d ever stopped thinking about her. I could have lied, but after three decades I was too tired to defend something I’d never even admitted to myself. I told my wife that the girl had appeared in my thoughts for years, even though I’d never contacted her. My wife looked at the photograph and said, “So I wasn’t married to another woman. I was married to a man who was always leaving a little room for one.” And that was somehow harder to hear than if she’d simply accused me of having an affair.
