The Arrangement

I have a good life here. I wanted to get that out of the way before i say anything else.

The house is beautiful. The children are in a good school. The neighbourhood is the kind where people wave to each other and the streets get ploughed quickly after snow. The car is nice. The groceries are not a source of anxiety. When something needs to be fixed, it gets fixed. When my children need something, they have it. I do not take any of this for granted because I grew up in a home where nothing was guaranteed, and I chose a man who could provide, and he has provided, and I am grateful.

My husband comes four times a year.

He is in Nigeria. He runs businesses there. The kind that need him present. I came to Canada because we agreed it was best for the children, best for the long term, best for the future we were trying to create. I understood the arrangement and so I was fully onboard.

But understanding an arrangement and living inside it are two different things.

He calls every day. Sometimes twice. He sends money before I need to ask. He is attentive in the ways that are available to him across a time zone and a six-hour difference. When he visits, he is present. He fills the house for three weeks and then he is gone again and the house is exactly the same size it was before he arrived but it feels larger somehow, emptier, the way a room feels after the lights go off even though the room has not changed.

I know about the women in Nigeria.

I have not asked directly and he has not said directly and we have maintained between us a careful arrangement of not saying certain things. I am not a fool. I know the shape of a man who travels frequently and has money and is away from his wife for most of the year. I have made my peace with this, on most days.

What I have not made my peace with is the loneliness.

Not the loneliness of being alone. I am not alone. I have my children, my neighbours, church on Sundays, a WhatsApp group that never sleeps. I have a life. What I have is the loneliness of a woman who is still very much alive and knows it; who goes to bed every night in a beautiful house and wakes up every morning in that same beautiful house and somewhere between sleeping and waking I am aware of a hunger that the house and the car and the good school and the four visits a year do not fully address. I am aware of my own body. I am aware of time passing.

I have had thoughts.

I will not describe the thoughts in detail but I will say they have arrived, and I have sat with them, and I have not acted on them, and the reason I have not acted on them is not entirely virtue. It is also calculation; especially because i know what this life costs and the risk of losing it if certain lines were crossed. I am not trapped. I have chosen. I remind myself of this regularly. I chose this man. I chose this arrangement. I can unchoose it if I decide to. I have not decided to.

So I stay. I keep the house beautiful. I raise the children well. I take the calls twice a day across a six-hour difference. I count the weeks until the next visit and I do not examine this counting too closely because examining it too closely leads back to the thoughts, and the thoughts lead back to the calculation, and the calculation always arrives at the same place.

Four times a year.

I have started going to the gym. Very regularly. It helps.