Our sanctuary, ourselves

“I’m sorry…,” he murmured. “I just don’t see us as a couple anymore.”

He kept his eyes averted from hers. Angry tears slid down her face.

“Why are you telling me this NOW….while we’re at an OWL SANCTUARY?!”

“I don’t know,” he stammered. “...Because it’s sorta quiet?” We hadn’t seen any owls yet at the sanctuary, so it was eerily quiet. “And there are owls to...I don’t know...ease your mind?...Comfort you??”

“Comfort me?! How on earth are OWLS going to comfort me?”

“I thought they were your favorite animal.”

“WHAT?! My favorite animal is the KOALA!”

“See...this is why we’re breaking up.”

“WHAT!?!? We’re breaking up because my favorite animal is the KOALA?!”

“We-are-breaking-up-because…I don’t know you, Griselda.”

Griselda. He never calls me Griselda. Even my father didn’t call me Griselda and he was the one who named me. He called me Zelda.

And took me to Australia where he introduced me to koalas. My FAVORITE animal.

I even love eucalyptus because of koalas. It’s toxic to most animals, including koalas, but they just go ahead and eat it anyway.

I love how they’ve evolved to make it work, how they survive on something that should poison them. In fact, it inspires me. It inspires me to make the best out of any situation, even a situation like this one where my heart is threatening to shatter into millions of pieces.

“You do know me, Roost, you do,” I implore without meaning to -

“Robert,” he corrects softly.

“Roost,” I counter. “You know me and still do. I have no idea why you think you don’t know me. I have no idea why you’re thinking of breaking up with me. I barely understand why we’re at an owl sanctuary of all places as you don’t even like birds.”

“I like birds!”

So that’s what Roost is going to address and defend: that he likes birds. No continued claim about not knowing me. No assertion that he was kidding about breaking up with me. No change of heart complete with an impassioned embrace and enraptured words absolutely oozing with love for me.

He keeps his eyes away from mine, which infuriates me, and he knows. He knows how much I hate him avoiding my gaze.

Owls hoot into the darkness, startling Roost with the sound. Turning his head, our eyes lock.

What passes between us brings fresh tears to my eyes. Roost...Robert...is a shadow of a man. Afraid of the sounds in the air, of angering the woman before him. He looks beaten and tired.

He looks so unfamiliar. And he looks at me like he doesn’t know me at all. How did this happen? How could this happen?

“When?” I finally ask.

Robert remains quiet.

“When did it happen?” I try again. “Like...when did you stop knowing me?”

That I’ve heard and acknowledged what he said brought some light into his eyes, “I think it’s been about a year now. Shortly after your father died.”

Well, then. I didn’t even know myself after my father died, but Robert had been patient and loving. He tended to me. He helped with the process of grieving a person, even the nuts and bolts of when someone passes away. Robert was there for everything. And yet he felt that he didn’t know me? He knew me more than anybody!

Sensing my confusion and frustration, Robert sighed a very weary sigh.

“Griselda, I love you, but I don’t know you. You used to call and text me all the time. You used to try to burrow into me, but for a year plus, you’ve stayed away from touching me at all. We used to be everything to each other -“

“ - and now I am everything to myself.”

The words tumbled out without my meaning to spill them out so casually...so callously.

Both of us remained silent as the owls hooted to one another in the night.

“I don’t know you, Griselda,” he repeated, softly, like he was ushering in a wind to sweep up the pine needles, the leaves, our memories, ourselves, in a gust to deposit us elsewhere.

“You’re right, you don’t,” I say agreeing with him. And my body feels like it’s just ingested poison, but I allow it to course through me, like koalas do.