The Elephant Stays

“Let’s not do this today, please.”

Ben's voice broke the uncomfortable silence in the room, as he leaned against the sink, his hands submerged in soapy water. He didn’t look up, didn’t need to—he could feel her eyes boring into his back, just as they had every evening for the past few months.

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“Okay. If not today, then when?” Sarah maintained her calmness in tone but one could detect the irateness in her vocabulary choice. She was leaning over the table, looking composed, her arms held securely against her sleeves. The ring of her marriage was shining in the dim light, this was a detail she wanted to let go of. “There has been no one clear about this issue. It has been too long of a dance.”

Ben sighed, the sound barely audible over the clink of dishes being rinsed. “I know, Sarah. But not now. It’s been a long day.”

Lately, each day stretched longer than it had the day before. When Ben got home, late as always, he was tired, ill tempered from hours in the office. The burden of what was done and what was not had taught Sarah silence—an un-announced consensus to avoid certain issues. They ate dinner, they exchanged the basics about their days, and they retreated to opposite corners of the house until sleep offered an escape.

But today was different. There was an uncharacteristic sensation hovering about them both. The elephant in the room had grown so large, it was suffocating.

Sarah sat down, the chair scraping against the floor. “Ben, let’s stop this charade, it’s getting insane and we can’t keep acting like this.”

Bens jaws tightened. “I am not acting.”

“No, in fact you are,” she refuted, getting more vocal. “We are both acting and every time we come to this place, this table, or any table for that matter. Wishing that it'll be fine when we know that it really isn’t.”

He turned off the faucet and dried his hands, finally turning to face her. The weariness in his face made his eyes look dark.

“What do you want me to say Sarah?” Ben had a pointed drawl, which had an abrupt bearing on the stagnant tension. “That I pity myself? That I want to bang my head against a wall when I think of this house? That I do not recognize anything about my life anymore?”

Sarah recoiled, but still she did not relent. “I want you to tell me the truth. For once. You’ve been shutting me out for months, Ben. You barely look at me anymore. We don’t talk, not really.”

He ran a hand through his locks. “There is nothing more there to say. The same dialogue has repeated itself many times.”

“We have never had this conversation,” she said somewhat soft. “We have never addressed the real issue in front of us.”

Ben’s gaze did not waver although it did flicker, more of his walls fell for a moment before he did the same as her and crossed his arms.

“What do you think the problem is, then? Enlighten me.”

Sarah seemed to be unsure. There it was—the moment she had waited so long to arrive, yet had been equally terrified for its arrival. “You don’t want to live this sort of life, do you?”

The statement was coming out more as a challenge to him. However, he did not say anything at all. He preferred to keep his gaze down to the ground where at least the shame of her eyes would leave him in peace.

“I knew it,” she said, her voice breaking. “You don’t have to say it. I can feel it every time you walk through the door. You don’t want to be here. Not with me.”

Ben raised his gaze; it was impossible to tell what he was thinking. “It is not only you Sarah. It is everything.”

She was stunned, and blinked. “What do you want to say?”

He let out a breath, exasperated, finding it increasingly difficult to continue the conversation. “It is work. It is the house. It is the... I don’t know. It’s like, I am sitting there. We are all sitting here. I get up every day, and I go to work, but I don’t even understand why I’m doing any of this. It’s like we all just keep going through the drill, but we all are just waiting for someone to say cut.”

Sarah’s heart tightened. She had experienced it as well – the feeling of everything going at a glacial pace. The freshly built world that they used to know and which had originally been filled with joy now seems to be a collection of duties. But to hear him express it out loud makes it real in a way that she had not prepared to imagine.

“You are unhappy,” she said gently. “And I am unhappy as well.”

He didn’t argue. Instead, he sat down across from her, his hands resting on the table between them. For the first time in a long time, they were face to face, both stripped bare by the weight of their shared truth.

“So what do we do now?” Ben asked, almost choking on his voice in the process.

Sarah couldn’t provide any solution. How do you fix something that has been broken for such a long time? They had given it a shot- therapy, date nights, long weekends away- but it had all proved futile.

“I don’t have that yet,” she reasoned. “But it is something we need to start confronting and more importantly addressing”

Ben simply nodded, focusing on the last vestiges of the light outside the window and though night was quickly approaching, it wasn’t so dark yet inside. “I think. . .I think I have been avoiding it for fear of saying out loud because I am afraid it might be true that we may not be able to fix it.”

It hurt, but Sarah welcomed the pain as it was borne from the truth. “I feel the same way”

There was total quietness for what looked like forever with only the kitchen clock in the background making ‘tick tock’ sound. It was not the deafening oppressive silence that had engulfed them in the past months, but rather it was quieter and more reflective. Where they were actually ready to face the big mammoth after it had sat down for too long in their life.

"I do not want to lose you" Ben said out of nowhere, his voice almost cracking. The hurt was ridden in those words “But I mean I do not know how we can return to… where we were before.”

Sarah moved the table and extend all the way to him so that her fingertips brushed with his. “Perhaps we’re not supposed to go back. Maybe we need to figure out what comes next. Together.”

It was the first time in ages that he had stared at her, really at her. There was something in his gaze perhaps hope. “You think this is possible?”

“I can’t tell you,” she said honestly. “But I am willing to make an effort. If you are.”

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