As best we can

You loved me the best you could. I see the evidence of that occasionally. The little porcelain boxes I unpacked today showed me that you loved me as best you could. The overflowing basket of flowers that I threw away when we left the apartment that last time showed me that you loved me as best you could.

Looking through the photos as I moved them showed me that we did the best we could. We tried to be happy. We tried to do what was right, what was expected. We smiled when we thought we should and we put the face on that people wanted to see.

We lived through our struggles and we tried to get through as best we could. We tried to talk, we tried to laugh, we tried to live as best we could.

I loved you as best I could. I tried to be what I thought you wanted me to be and tried not to feel the pain that doing that cost me. I tried to perform as your wife as best I could. I hope you see that in the moments, in the times when something brings on the memories, the echoes of our life. I hope you can see that I loved you as best I could.

But the best we could wasn’t enough. We were missing the tools, the power, the… something. Something that could help us not hurt each other. Something that could protect our hearts as we struggled to find our way through the hard times. Something that we could use to get us through the “as best we could” times and get us to the other side of that. Our families, who did the best they could, left us without the ways to fill in the holes, fill in the blanks, and understand how not to destroy that tenuous, delicate, fragile thing that love is.

And now…

We live as best we can.