Those Unexpected, Lonely Places.

We have had the best last couple of days ever with yummy waffle breakfasts and long naps in the afternoon listening to the rain and trips into town after dinner for ice cream. After we put Ethan down, we've been watching old movies, the kind with tender romance and no guns or cars blowing up anywhere. After the movie last night we started getting ready for bed.
It had been such a perfect day, I honestly can't imagine where or why the argument started but suddenly I am on the pot screaming my brains out at him. We haven't fought like that in a long time. Ever I think. It seems the longer this marriage goes on, the less often we argue, but when we do, the intensity is bigger than ever before.
It's frightening.
I finally ended up on the couch in the living room alone in the dark. So angry and hopeless and tired. I was so out of it I couldn't even think of anything to do but sit there, my chest taking in deep, shaky recovery breaths every so often.
The last thing I expected was him to come out and say his sorry. He has never come after me, a fact that I learned to accept very early in my marriage, so when I saw his body shape walk over to me, sit down next to me, touch my shoulder and apologize, I burrowed my eyebrows in confusion but still just sat there staring, like a doped ape, at nothing.
We slowly, after some time of sitting quietly, began to say short little sentences. Little questions, one word answers. It was enough to soften whatever it is that hardens inside, and I grabbed a hold of his neck and let my head fall onto his cold arm, feeling his skin on my cheek. I slobbered him with my wet tears and whatever else comes out when you are crying like a crazy pregnant woman.
The sweetest and most painful turning point in the whole event was when I realized everything I was so livid with Joey about was crap, that in fact once again, I was using him to make me happy and when he failed to do this, I felt hurt and lost and rejected.
It's simple, and yet I can't remember it for it seems like more than three seconds, or maybe at the most a day, before I am depending on him to fulfill every complicated and sinful need that I have, so deep inside I don't even know the names of them myself.
It's at this point that that feeling of aloneness comes. And it seems so wrong, that I have to feel so alone in a relationship where you have someone with you most of the time, someone who has told you that they love you and will always be with you...
The simple truth is Joey a gift from God to me, not to fulfill me but to bless me as God allows, to sharpen me and to lead me closer to God. And God, I am learning, is nearer in those places of aloneness, than anywhere else in the world.