I’ve thought about leaving on the first warm day of every year since 2006. It’s seasonal, which is what makes it ridiculous and also what makes it true. Something about the light in March changes me. For about a week, I mentally disappear into apartments, different cities, and a version of myself who eats dinner alone and doesn’t mind. Then the feeling passes. I put the storm windows away, return to my routine, and don’t think about leaving again until the following March. Nineteen Marches. Nineteen private versions of a life I never had the courage to choose.
A man who truly wanted to leave would have left. What I’ve actually been doing is taking an annual holiday from my own marriage without going anywhere. My wife has never known what those weeks are. She thinks I simply get restless when winter ends, and she’s said it fondly over the years, as if it’s an eccentric little part of me she has learned to accommodate. She doesn’t know that every spring I spend several days mentally packing a bag and imagining what it would feel like to wake up somewhere she isn’t.
This March, she said something in the kitchen that stopped me. She told me she’d always dreaded April. I asked her why April, and she said it was because March was the month when I became distant. She’d noticed it every year since 2006. She’d never known what caused it, but she’d started recognizing the signs—the silence, the long drives, the way I stared out windows. Then she said, “Every March, I wonder if this is the year you’re finally going to leave.”
I didn’t know what to say because she’d described exactly what I’d spent nineteen years hiding. I asked why she’d never confronted me, and she said she had been afraid that asking would turn a possibility into a decision. She told me she’d spent nineteen springs pretending not to notice because she loved the life we had the other eleven months of the year. Then she looked at me and said, “I’ve been waiting for April every year too—not because I wanted you to leave, but because I wanted to find out if you’d decided to stay.”
