I couldn’t sleep. Maybe it was the time change. Maybe it was the dull roar of the air conditioner. Maybe it was the general catastrophe of my life, but I tossed and turned, trying to get comfortable, clutching pillows to my chest, then throwing them off the bed when I got too hot.
My mind raced–thinking about the meeting next week with the lawyers, worrying about Jackson, figuring out how I was going to start over. And beyond that was a landscape I was too afraid to explore: the rest of my life.
Thinking about J. was my respite. The truth is that I’d been thinking about him daily for a while now, long before my marriage came to its inglorious end. He was a place I went to escape. Though we rarely exchanged words–or maybe because we rarely exchanged words–he was a blank page on which I could write the ideal protagonist.
I had a handful of things I knew about him for certain. I expanded and extrapolated on these meager facts: he was a great coach, but, more important, he was a positive model for boys in the process of becoming men. In my hungry imagination, this also meant he had the capacity to love deeply and meaningfully.