This Family of Snow Angels

I think again of the snow angels we made in the month before our end, you and I, and our daughter, falling back into the snow and spreading arms and legs wide, laughing like we owned the world; I recall a small fear growing inside me at the thought of falling backwards, hoping that the snow would be soft and not hardened by the force of my impact, injuring me in some way, perhaps minor, but also perhaps seriously, an unhealable damage to my back or neck that would guarantee me pain for the rest of my days. 

I knew of your unfaithfulness by then, had known for almost six full weeks, a subtle suspicion sitting inside me, like an itch that I not only could not reach, but was not entirely sure where it might be located, a suspicion made solid fact when I invaded your privacy – my hand shaking as I handled your phone, and mixture of shame at this invasion and fear at what I might discover – and saw text messages that I should never have seen. I convinced myself that it was a simple fling, a dalliance of the fleeting kind, a different kind of itch being scratched, and you would return to me before you had even left. And weren’t we here, the three of us, laughing and acting like a family that could never be separated, a husband and wife deeply in love, a daughter loved as deeply? Yes, it was just a fling, and when it ended, it would be the past, one which I would, I was sure, given enough time, be able to forget, an unpleasant memory that disappeared into itself, like a wound that managed to heal without any trace of a scar. 

But I was wrong, of course, so wrong, this affair of yours far more than a fling, a relationship in itself, one that slowly grew to eclipse our marriage, your reason for it never fully explained to me though I asked many times, demanded in fact – in truth it was an answer I never really wanted, no matter how necessary it seemed to me at the time – but all you would say was that you were unhappy and had been for several years, adding that surely I myself had to admit that I had been unhappy too, which was far from the truth, but you were adamant this was the case, no matter how many times I tried to convince you otherwise, as though this was the greater insult than the affair and you leaving me for another. 

Miles now separate you and our daughter from me, while the fling that was a relationship growing alongside the diminishing of our marriage occupies the side of the bed which was once mine, and somehow still is, just at the roof above is no longer mine and yet remains mine – not just legally, which it does, but also emotionally, and, somehow, morally – and the snow angels we made exist only in my memory, where, if nowhere else, so much of us as a family still lives.  Edward Lee's poetry, short stories, non-fiction and photography have been published in magazines in Ireland, England and America, including The Stinging Fly, Skylight 47, and Acumen.