Notes From a Vacation

Here are some things to know about traveling with someone you love, and have loved for many years, who you are trying to find the strength to leave.

1. Vacations, even beach vacations where it rains every day or one of you gets some painful form of dysentery, fall into a mental folder marked special. When we were away has a kind of magic, no matter what happened. Maybe trips are an echo of a time when things were new.

So even when you are in the thought process of un-coupling, much of the time spent on vacation ends up (perhaps by mental default) in the special folder. You will probably decide on vacation that none of the conclusions you'd reached about your relationship before your departure are true, after all. You actually are happy. This is how things are supposed to be. Your heart is full, and sweet, and greateful. You don't feel empty; you just needed this vacation.

When you come home, the realization that this is not reality will hurt.

2. A couple traveling together speaks the private language of couple. After years in a relationship, you just know how to do stuff, away, together. You each unconsciously know whose job it is to gather the passports, book the rental car, pack the toothpaste. If you're flying, you know which of you gets the aisle; who has to sit at a window. There is lazy comfort in this. If you are part of a couple that is happy or at least intact and surviving the world, I urge you to try to enjoy these rituals. They are dear and spectacularly unique. See them as one of life's little gifts.

3. While traveling, you will begin to interpret celestial pointers, signs from the universe, in irrelevant actions. I found it prophetic on a recent trip, for example, that I only wanted two bites of my chicken taco, generously giving the rest to my husband. Did this mean my heart was opening somehow to him, in a new way? When he began driving more aggressively through green lights, instead of slowing down to a crawl on the chance they were going to turn yellow, I took it as sign that he was becoming aware of his own passive aggression. And so on.

I don't know why this is. Maybe the changed perspective of being in a new place makes us yearn to see everything in a fresh way, including the mess inside our own hearts.

4. At some point on the trip, you will experience irrational rage towards your partner. This is completely normal, and will come at an unexpected moment. Here's what: it has nothing to do with the fact that he forgot to pack his bathing suit.

5. Once you're back home, have fallen back to your normal routine and the aching malaise starts creeping in, pictures of you and your partner together on the trip may shock you.

When I was a very little girl, my sister and I had a pact: Whenever forced to pose for a picture, we would do some funny little physical quirk-- crinkle a pinky or move a foot in a funny way -- that the photographer (we thought) wouldn't notice, but that my sister and I would recognize when the pictures were developed as our secret code. For all time, that photo would bear the stamp of our rebellious yet unspoken truth.

Something similar happens, unconsciously, in your vacation photos. When the picture is being taken, you will feel like your face is in its correct position, that you are standing together the way you always stand together, smiling the way you always smile. It will feel utterly usual.

But when you finally see the photo in detail, on Facebook or as a print or in a frame after the vacation has ended, you will spot it: the rebellious unspoken truth. It's always somewhere--your smile or his; the slightly awkward way in which you are standing; a glint of something in your eye. I will not. Captured forever.

The vacation is over. It is time to move on.