I had a dream years ago--I can't say if it's five years or ten years or longer. The reason I remember it is that the morning after having it, I immediately wrote it down--something I rarely do. But it had been so vivid, a grainy grey screenplay that ran through my night.
Last night, I understood it for the first time.
In the dream, I am an older woman (or, older than I was then--so, probably the age I am now). I was in a train station, old and echoey, regal and faintly European. I was rushing to catch a train to a town called Herndon. (I don't know if such a place exists.) I was leaving something in a hurry. I was anxious.
As my train was boarding and I began to hurry my way toward the track, I was confronted by a man--out of nowhere, my husband. Though being a dream, he was a husband out of Central Casting. I felt caught, guilty. There we stood, his hand on my arm, my name reverberating through the smoky train track in the echo of the station. He said only one word: "Why?"
I knew magically that I was leaving him--trying to do it quickly and quietly--because he had been cheating on me with another woman for years and years. (None of this is true in real life, to my knowledge.)
In the dream I began to cry. I said, "I'm sorry. I have simply tolerated too much." I remember being filled with grief and a shocking sense of failure.
In years of thinking about the train to Herndon, I could never understand why my husband was the one who was angry and accusatory, and I guilty and apologetic. If he was cheating on me, why was I the one running away?
Fast forward a decade, or half a decade -- as I said, I can't recall exactly when I dreamt it.
Last night, sitting together on the train up to our country house, my husband got into an argument with a man in our car. The man was talking too loudly on his cell phone with a friend about the best places locally to buy doughnuts--describing in vivid detail specifically which doughnuts to buy from which venues. (I am not making this up.) My husband asked him to lower his voice, angry words were exhanged.
In full disclosure, the argument was approximately the eight trillionth argument I have sat through on a train in the company of this man now my husband. They erupt when he is anxious, or angry, or hurting, or lonely, or sad, or really any time he is feeling something that he doesn't want to express.
For some reason, during last night's incident, I put my hand on his leg -- something I have never done before for fear of him turning and shouting at me -- and begged him, quietly, to stop. He was berating a stranger who had stopped fighting back. Now my husband was the weird guy on the train everyone was rolling their eyes at.
He couldn't hear me, intent on his scolding, and continued it for another half a minute.
After he'd stopped, I sat quietly in my seat for as long as I could -- about three minutes. I pretended to read a magazine, and that it wasn't visible that my heart was leaping in my chest, rhythmically.
Finally I gave up, stood up, gathered my things. I asked my husband to please let me pass; I was going to sit in the next car. At first he demanded--quietly, calmly--that I explain my departure. Finally, knowing that I would not hesitate much longer to exact public embarassment upon him, he let me by.
I rearranged myself in the next car, which was better air conditioned anyway. Nyah. As I settled in for the short remainder of the journey to our beautiful home, I began to cry.
Then I remembered the train to Herndon.
Finally, it made sense.
Truth: For almost twelve years this man I love has been behaving badly -- childishly, selfishly, hurting me.
Truth: I know it, I know that he knows it, and still it continues.
I have tolerated too much.
What would have happened if, the first time it happened, on whatever train or in whatever airport or restaurant or hotel it first became noticeable, I had looked at him with the horror I felt, picked up my bags and walked away?
Would he have followed? Immediately? Sheepishly, days later? Ever?
What would I have done then?
Whatever the answers, I am where I am. Somehow I made little decisions all along the way that got me here. I believe this is the point of the the train to Herndon. That we as humans are somehow built to go with the flow, to turn with the tide so the ride is easy, maybe a little thrilling, but smooth. We are built to forget that at some point we may have to turn and face the opposite direction. That when we do, everything that was so easy going in one way will be infinitely harder, going in the other.
