Emma's Diary

October 22nd

October 22nd

We went to bed before the election results came in. I just looked them up. Bonnie’s local candidate won, so she’ll be happy about that. There was a party scheduled last night for all the volunteers, but she decided not to go because there would be an open bar. No sense tempting fate.

I haven’t actually talked to Bonnie today. She left here at six in the morning to take out the trash at her new place. Her upstairs neighbour is 71 years old, and when they met, the old man said: With the last tenant, we switched off every week who takes out the trash bins.

Bonnie was kind of like: How about you let me do it all the time?

Did she also go back to the house she shared with Jim until last week, to take out the trash there? Jim isn’t able to lift things, but, judging from the way he’s reacted so far, I wouldn’t be surprised if he simply asked a neighbour. That’s sensible.

My friend Lhasa says: People are more resilient than you think. You don’t have to baby them. They’ll find a way of getting things done.

Bonnie says I baby her, sometimes—opening doors, offering to carry the heavier bag, wanting to walk closest to traffic so if a car mounts the curb it’ll hit me first. These actions would be considered chivalrous if I were a dude. But I’m not, so I guess it comes off patronizing. That’s never my intention.

I think it’s got to do with being at that age where most/many/some people are raising children and I’m not. I never thought I had a maternal bone in my body, but there’s something about 39 that shakes you up. You suddenly want to take care of someone, anyone. A partner? Sure! Doesn’t matter who. Whom? Bonnie would know. She’s so smart.

With 40 on the horizon, you kind of go: Is my life what I thought it would be?

And even if it is, you go: Am I happy living this way?

For me, the answer was no. That’s why I told Bonnie that if she wanted to keep this relationship going, it couldn’t be on-again-off-again. It couldn’t be an affair.

I don’t want to be the other woman anymore.

And now I’m not.

Now I’m... what am I?

We kissed yesterday. She says kissing is all right, just not full-blown s*x. Still, it wasn’t... I don’t know. We used to kiss for hours. I guess that was twenty years ago, but even recently the kissing has always been great.

Bonnie has a set of exercises she does every day, so I asked her to teach them to me. I figured that would be a nice couples activity to do together. It’s not s*x, but at least it’s physical.

She taught me her routine of stretches and sit-ups and stuff like that. It was fun. I like when she teaches me things, because her breadth of knowledge is amazing, but she also says she learns stuff from me. For instance, I always do push-ups on my knuckles. That’s what I learned in karate class: push-ups on my knuckles, on the floor of a church basement. We’re talking 30 years ago I learned this, but it stuck with me, and I find it easier than doing push-ups with my hands flat on the ground. Bonnie took an interest, and she said she’d try it.

After that, we got talking about how, in yoga, you always want to balance out your poses. I don’t know how to articulate this concept properly, because I’ve never been to an actual yoga class, but she’s never done anything approximating yoga, so I guess I could tell her anything.

I got out this book from the 70s that my grandmother gave me. I don’t know what it’s called, because it’s missing the cover and the first 24 pages, but it’s a yoga book. It’s got pictures and poses and instructions. So we went through it together and Bonnie challenged me to take on some of the more esoteric poses. Can poses be esoteric? Some of the ones that looked kind of silly, let’s say.

After all that movement, I told Bonnie I didn’t want to pressure her, but I couldn’t stop thinking about kissing. It’s all I wanted to do. I wasn’t saying that to make her feel like she had to kiss me, or like she should. I was just saying it so she would know how attracted I am to her, and that I think about these things often.

She said kissing was okay, kissing wasn’t against the rules.

I climbed on the couch where she was sitting and I started kissing her, but she backed off and said she needed to brush her teeth. I told her that her mouth tasted fine and I hadn’t brushed my teeth either, but she insisted, which meant I needed to brush, too, so we’d be even. You can’t have one fresh mouth and one gross mouth. They both have to be gross or both be fresh (not that they were gross to start out with, but you know what I mean).

So after we’d both brushed, I worried maybe the mood had been shattered. She sat back down on the couch and I splayed myself across her lap and I kissed her, and it was good. I kissed her deeply, and it felt like those kisses from twenty years ago. It felt like kissing in the woods, before we had any privacy. Up against a tree. I wanted to run my hands all over her body, and I wanted her to do the same to me.

I wanted everything.

But kissing would have to suffice.

That sounds passive-aggressive, but I don’t mean it that way at all. Kissing was legitimately fulfilling. It’s more than we’d done in... gosh, it’s got to be a month or two since we were together, sexually. We stopped seeing each other before she left Jim. It seemed sensible, at the time. I don’t know why. She set a date and we agreed we would be together then, and not until then, and that’s what happened.

I would have been happy for that kiss to go on for hours, forever, but Bonnie interrupted it to tell me something about her former boss. She said: We used to go out for drinks every Friday and talk about whatever book we were reading.

Okay.

Bonnie said: Every time we’d say goodnight, we’d kiss. Just a quick peck on the lips, like you do, you know.

I don’t know anyone who kisses their boss on the lips, but okay.

Bonnie went on: Then there was this one time when we were standing in the parking lot, chatting, and I went in for our usual kiss goodbye, but it didn’t stop at just a peck. He held on for more. I pulled away. I put a stop to it pretty fast.

I said: Wow.

And I’ll tell you, from the bottom of my heart, I wasn’t the least bit jealous hearing this. Isn’t that funny, how I’ve been so jealous of Jim for all these years, but now I hear that a man who wasn’t her husband had kissed Bonnie in a parking lot and I’m just like: Tell me more!

Bonnie said: It was nothing, really. My boss laughed it off. It wasn’t a long kiss. But someone walking by did shout out for us to get a room.

That made me laugh. If it was the kind of kiss that warrants a Get A Room, then it was definitely a long kiss.

When Bonnie left Jim, Jim asked her: Is there someone else?

Well, yes, there’s someone else. There’s me.

But Bonnie didn’t tell him that. She said: There are possibilities.

I’m a possibility.

Bonnie says she isn’t attracted to her boss, and I believe her. Anyway, I say her boss, but I mean her former boss. They don’t work together anymore, and they stopped going out for drinks after that incident. I think. I’m assuming they did. I can’t remember if Bonnie said so.

But now I’m thinking maybe word got back to Jim. This Get A Room incident took place within walking distance of their house. Bonnie doesn’t know who shouted the words. Could have been a neighbour. Could have been anyone. Gossip spreads. You never know who will find out what.

So maybe Jim believes the boss is the possibility.

Maybe Jim believes Bonnie is with him right now.