I open my eyes to cup of coffee on the hotel nightstand. I know that my husband, whose shower I can hear through the wall, is the one who has placed it there. This registers as positive points. Later in the morning I sit down on the bed and say to him, “Listen, everything you do it is being filtered and sorted into one of two categories in the recesses of my mind: 1) Okay, he does love me, and 2) He doesn’t care at all.

This sorting, I have figured out, is really going on at all times, but only now am I truly conscious of it. For the past two days I have been hurting with thoughts in my head that number two is winning out. The night before last was the worst. I unleash my pain and sudden fury in a series of texts. A man who loves a woman need not be begged to give attention, needs no direct and repetitive asking for what she needs on a regular basis.

I am right, and if he would simply concede, if he could find the truth in my words and know, to understand, their true desperation. I have never known a creature, this one they call “man”, to so much lack such a natural sympathy, to be able to cause such pain to women, and at the same time, have no capacity to comfort them in any of it. I know I’ve gone too far somewhere and I do apologize, for the suddenness, for the method.

Just get down here and hold me, you stupid fool. I don’t say the last part. I have no interest in giving in to his direction. He will hold me and I will cry this out in his arms. And I know my limits. I can do this if the complaints, if the pain and bitterness I harbor has to do with anything else except for him. He comes down to where I am and I can see he’s trying. I cry it out, relieved, yet remain quiet and depressed the entire next day.

But that’s all in the past now. Today I felt better, though still baffled by these repeated pains that come upon me. We leave Seward, Nebraska to make the second leg of our trip to Custer, South Dakota. We pass the day in peace, with the suspense gradually building with the change of the landscape from plains into bluffs. For the most part I read, grateful to have a book to keep me busy as we ride. I find a woman in the story.