The Threshold

I have been in survival mode for so long that it feels like posture learned too early and never corrected. If I’m honest, I don’t even remember the boat sinking. I only know I’ve been floating. Arms locked around everyone I’m trying to save — mistaking the endurance for love.

Tonight I printed pictures out from when we first met. Cutting. Glueing. Taping. Scrolling back five years in hopes that I could stitch something back together inside this unfinished scrapbook.

It wasn’t until I reached the photos of the house we’ve lived in for the last four years — empty then, just as it will be again — that something in me began to stir. The recognition was sharp, almost deserved.

Scissors make this particular sound when they move through paper. Rhythmic. Steady. Hollow. The cut is so clean, so precise. I found myself wondering why we can’t remove pain in the same way. Why trauma doesn’t shear away so elegantly. Why people root deeper than we can cut.

It was just before Thanksgiving when we drove three hours to Cave City, Kentucky — a place I've always enjoyed for its smallness but grandeur and quiet spectacles. Our first cave tour was of a small cave system that begins beneath a gift shop. At the back of the cave, the guide asked if anyone wanted a photo.

One picture.

Two.

And then I was suddenly being proposed to by the man I had loved for five years.

Was that really only months ago?

The sound of the printer’s inner mechanics hummed and clicked, pulling be back. I realized I had been staring blankly, mouth half-opened, through the wall in front of me. Completely still, frozen in time.

Scissors in one hand. A half-cut photograph of a new couple smiling so effervescently with an innocence I almost envy.

Paper clippings lay scattered across the desk and floor. Pictures of us smiling back at me. The scrapbook held only the beginning, not the middle, not the weight of it, not the meaty bits. And there I was hunched over, disheveled, tear swollen eyes, trying to literally glue and scrapbook all of it back together.

Not us.

Not we.

Just me.

So, what if the life raft and the ocean have both mistaken themselves for home? What happens when the nervous system no longer consents to living in a constant state of distress?

The printer's hum softened, a small, mechanical surrender — and the room returned to itself.

I sat there longer than I meant to, unsure whether I had been trying to preserve something or prepare for its absence.

We still lived together.

The scrapbook was still unfinished.

And I could not yet tell if I was piecing together a history or saying a goodbye.

We still have about sixty days left in this 100 year old house. Sixty mornings of shared coffee. Sixty nights of the dogs getting on our nerves. Sixty days of shared experiences. The lease, life, and the responsibilities do not end just because something inside us has been redefined or transformed.

Nothing appears broken on the outside.

We still move around each other out of habit. We still discuss our days, our plans. Five years doesn’t disappear in a single conversation or slammed door. It loosens slowly.

I am simply trying to exist inside that unraveling, that in-between liminal space without rushing it toward a verdict or the inevitable. Not everything that ends does so because it was wrong. Some things end because they have reached their necessary stages; just at the edge of something else.

We are familiar with the discussions of the recounts to what lead up to the rupture. The arguments, the betrayals, the why’s, what happened and how’s, the sharp jagged edges of impact and the crumbling rubble that follows.

But what about the threshold?

That narrow stretch of land between not completely staying nor immediately leaving — the almost harmoniously quiet interstice where nothing is exploding any more, and yet everything has been transformed.

In this ambiguous territory, nothing appears dramatically altered. The house still stands. The dogs still expect dinner at the same hour each day. We still say “we” when discussing the next few weeks, and sometimes neither of us corrects it. The word has this tendency to hang there a moment too long, a habit not yet retrained.

Eye contact has shortened. Not intentionally, no. Not even coldly or out of spite. Just enough to notice. We look at each other the way people do when they are trying not to confirm some unspoken tragedy out loud.

Even the daily choreography of the house has been transconfigured. The floor with all its dust-bunnies and dog hair waits longer to be swept. Dishes sit in the sink as if neither of us is sure whose future they will belong to. The fridge is now a mixed assortment of meals for one, take outboxes and questionable containers of who knows what.

But those small, unconscious gestures of partnership — taking out the trash without asking, making the morning coffee before the other wakes — somehow feel suspended, unspoken and untouchable.

This is the part no one often talks or writes about.

The maintenance of civility and what it feels like, what it is to experience and document in real time.

The quiet recalculation of language, house chores, and the slow editing of “we” into something less plural, all while still cohabitating and trying to maintain our daily lives.

I used to believe separation had to be explosive, and feel existential, not that it isn’t. But after the fallout and debris settles, when the reality of trying to navigate a detangling of two lives while still being responsible and functional.

Now, instead, I feel as if it’s more administrative. A series of recalculations and revisions. A careful untangling of pronouns.

A shared space that is learning how to divide itself without splintering, fracturing and falling apart.

Day Seven:

My body feels heavy. Not in a dramatic way. Just weighted, as if gravity has increased slightly and no one else has seemed to notice. I move through the motions within the perimeter of the day. Work. Small talk. Errands.

The world outside our house, continuing on, granted in a disarray of all its own, but still buzzing along. One crisis at a time, if you please.

Cutting. Maintaining a smile. Discussing the casual details of happenings and going ons.

Not mentioning the pit that rises when someone brings up wedding plans. I nod with a smile. Yes, we’re so excited. No, we are enjoying the engagement before we set a date. I simply brush it off into the future, as if it lives safely, untouched by the events of the present somewhere down the road.

Comb the hair. Hold it at a forty-five-degree angle. Cut.

Another nod. Another measured breath. Snip.

The hair falls softly to the floor. Ever so lightly, almost indifferent. I watch it gather at my feet and think how strange it is that something can be severed so cleanly. How easily it lets go.

Another snip.

I smile again. Inhale carefully.

Around me, day-to-day life continues. Conversations resume. And somewhere between the comb and the shear, I realize I am no longer tensing my body in quite the same way. It’s small, almost imperceptible.

I don’t know yet what standing will look like.

I only know it feels different from surviving.

And for now, I am letting that be enough.