Sarah left me behind when she retired. Her Oakland home had been where we were together, where we shared a double bed, where we played early music with our friends. Restaurants on Claremont Avenue were our playground. Fifteen years my senior, she retired when I was 50, but the earliest I could imagine retiring was at age 55. I did retire at 57, but that's another story.
As she later told me, she was then in survival mode. Still recovering from a knee injury, she had to find a home that she could afford, one that had no stairs and was convenient to public transportation (she doesn't drive).
She found herself a condo in Berkeley, but it was a studio with a twin bed instead of her spacious one-bedroom flat. So I couldn't spend the night at her place, although the early music group continued to meet in a public room in the building.
When she refused to visit me in San Francisco, I began to understand that our relationship had changed. I finally got the nerve to ask her how she characterized our relationship, and she said, friends - which confirmed my impression. It seems we had gradually, silently broken up.
I swallowed the bleak anger and hurt I felt in the interest of keeping her as a friend, and began to look around for a new lover. My next choice wasn't as good, but that's also another story.
Why didn't it occur to me to ask her what was happening at the time it was happening? Maybe because I hate arguments and raised voices. Maybe because I'd been presented with a lot of changes that were beyond my control when I was growing up. Objecting wasn't an option then, and it often seems beyond me now.
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