Excerpt from "Elusive Butterfly" # 2

Marriages are kindling in the hallucination of the drug of love, in a lie -- if not knowing who you are and who the other one is can be called a lie. Every major argument has a potential gulf over which each of us stand, one on one side and one on the other and say, "That's it. It's over." Then we think "I can't walk away," and we don't but there's a toll of unhappiness that weaves in and we deal with it. Some drink. Some mope. Some get religious. Some have affairs. But if I leave I will be back in the lonely world I was in before...

In the den the smiles and the kisses of our wedding pictures lecture me from the walls. They drone about virtue and morality and the depth of intimacy in domestic lovemaking. Through the open door I can still see him gaping and flaring on the bed. Ritual is the old quilt on the sofa; the gradual realization that being with the same person is not a bad way to live a life. But what we give up is fire and first kisses. I chose contentment over ecstacy, earth over fire...

I am furious with marriage for the way it buries love in the sludge of who takes out the trash; the way routine replace romance. [He] smiles at me over our sleeping daughter's head and in that crystal of time I see only the courage and kindness our marriage has brought out, not the cost, and I discover that marriage gives us the chance to be heroes.

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