Holiday in the sun

It's hot in Florida. Christmas was nearly 90 degrees Fahrenheit and 90% humidity. At night Corinne and I walk through the neighborhoods, stretching our legs in the relative cool. In the evenings, she and I awaken. We are night creatures, slow and stunned during the early daylight hours, and exultant when the world becomes quiet and still. Its only during these nighttime conversations that Corinne really talks. We talk about our family, our friends, our past decisions and our future ideas.

Last night, I asked her about Kimball, about how they met and fell in love. Kimball is about seventeen years her senior and they have two little girls together. I know the story, of course, the broad brush-strokes. But not from her perspective.
"It wasn't like you and Sjors, if that's what you mean," she said, initially defensive. "We didn't fall in love the first time we saw each other."
"Most love stories aren't," I agreed. "And I have no room to judge other types of love. It isn't as though my story has turned out particularly well."
I tried again.
"He was your TA for Physical Chemistry," I said. "Did you know you liked him?"
"I liked him, but not like that," she said. "He was a really good instructor, and funny. I liked his class. When it was over, I gave him a card. It was a Christmas card, and had some joke about agriculture or something. A couple of weeks later we saw each other in the Chemistry building. He asked me to go to an art exhibit with him."
She was going out with someone else at the time, a guy named Tim. Tim was her age and, like her, a martial artist. The two black-belt athletes would spar.
"Of course things were really bad then," she said. I know. We don't need to discuss this part. It was a terrible time for our family. I still don't know how we made it out. We're broken and stitched together and perpetually in pain, but we're out.
"One day, when we were sparring, there was something about the physical contact that made me respond emotionally. I'm not an emotional person so it was really weird. I just started crying. Tim was really sweet to me."
She dropped this description, returned to discussing Kimball.
"I needed support. I needed to feel normal. Kimball didn't seem to notice the awful things happening in our family. He just kept coming around," she said. "You know how he is. He was just...Kimball. We would go hiking or biking. He helped me get away."
When did she fall in love with Kimball?
"He said he loved me first," she says. "Two or three months after we started dating, he said he loved me."
"What did you think?" I said. "Did you love him?"
"Not yet," she replied thoughtfully. "I was the robot queen. I couldn't feel anything."
"What did you say to him when he told you?"
"I said thank you."
When did she know she loved him?
"I'd been accepted into graduate school at ASU," she said. "Mom and I drove down there, moved me into an apartment. I talked her into staying another day while I took the entrance exams. There were two sets of exams - one in the morning and one in the afternoon. I took the morning exams but it felt so wrong. I couldn't stop crying. It had never happened to me before. My body just wouldn't stop crying. I missed Kimball. It felt wrong to leave him. So I talked to mom."
"What did she say?"
"You know mom. She's pretty good at giving support once you've made a decision, but you know she's not very helpful when you're trying to make a decision. She said, 'if he was going to marry you, he would have done it already.'"
"Yeah, really helpful. But you came back."
"I came back. I packed up my things and drove back home. I didn't tell the University where I was going. I just didn't show up for the afternoon exams. They filed a missing-person report on me."
I watched her as she talked. She was tired. There is a perpetual tired-to-the-bone look about her these days. She even refers to her mothering style as "Zombie mother".  Is this fatigue, I wonder? Or something deeper? Is our old companion, depression, lurking in her mind?

The moon hovered high above the horizon during our walks. I watched it wane in the days before I left. I wish I could help. I wish there was something I could do.

A moment ago I felt a brief surge of something bright. I'm not sure what it was, a ray of sunlight in the soul, an exhalation of some spirit muse. I've been so heavy and mentally lethargic, its difficult to see my way to any sort of purpose. I've been trying to read Feynman's lectures on physics to get me caught up before my next job. I've been trying to read Quantum Mechanics, the news. Anything to get my brain stimulated. But there seem to have been dead patches for so long its difficult to understand why.