he couldn’t find the camera the night before we went to LA so our first day there all he wanted to do was go shopping. i said okay, we could take a few hours and buy a camera to document our rapidly dwindling three-day vacation, but i didn’t say that, since it was his first vacation, ever, and the first time we’d really been away since the miscarriage, and it’s possible he thought he was doing the right thing, though i think he was mostly scared. afterwards, we returned to our fancy hotel and i ordered a drink and he read the times and we looked at the hills and tried to deconstruct the relationships of our fellow vacationers and i took a lot of sitting-next-to-the-pool pictures. at some point i asked where our camera was and he said, “you mean my camera” and i was stunned, like: we had chosen our children’s names a year ago but you aren’t comfortable being co-proprietors of a camera? which is what i said to him, obviously, and he tried to laugh it off. it was a lovely trip, even going to the best buy was fun, like going to bed, bath, and beyond and blowing off work and eating doughnuts, but also sort of as lovely as a trip can be when you are trying to grapple with the fact that the person you have heard agree with two different couples therapists that you are his ideal love object and add that he would stay there in their offices as long as possible ($200/session) if it would fix the relationship is actually uncomfortable even pretending to share a $100 camera. 

8 Feb 2012 / 6 notes / conservative fantasies humiliation price tags runaway violent intimacy