Anne Greenawalt
The first time Jon reads your journal, he does it at your house while you’re sleeping. He tells you about it at the Mt. Gretna Art Show, days later, while you’re parked in a wet, grassy field that threw mud under your car. He says he did it because he thought he wasn’t the baby’s father, that maybe you had slept with your ex-boyfriend.
Your ex-boyfriend had a vasectomy years before you met, but, anyway, that wasn’t the point.
He apologizes for reading it. You ask how much of it he read. All of it, he says. He’s disappointed that you didn’t write more about him. It was all so…perfunctory wasn’t the word he used. You don’t write with emotion, he says.
You thought another ex-boyfriend was so intuitive until one day you came home from work to discover the desk drawer where you kept your journal was open. On the one hand, you were flattered he wanted to read your writing. On the other hand, you switched to password-protected digital journals. You don’t remember why you didn’t break up with him on the spot.
The other ex-boyfriend, the one with the vasectomy, told you he could understand why someone would want to read your journals. You were sitting on the edge of the couch, in the dark, where he had been lying, unmoving for hours after work for the third or fourth day in a row. You’re so unreadable, he said. It’s the only way to know you.
It was because of that comment – and because you were already two months pregnant – that you didn’t break up with Jon after he read your journal. You must have been too quiet, too pragmatic, too reserved. You would try to communicate better. Meanwhile, you kept writing in your journal as perfunctorily as you pleased, but with an updated password.
Your second child is less than a year old when Jon tells you he searched your browsing history. He found the terms “emotional abuse” and “how to break a lease.” You can’t control your crying when you explain that your therapist suggested that you educated yourself about emotional abuse. You’re the emotionally abusive one, he tells you. You’re the one who…you’re the one who…you’re the one who…
Two days later, you meet him at a trailhead on the Appalachian Trail after he takes an overnight backpacking trip with your first child, your three-year-old son. You each carry a child as you walk a mile or two up a mountain. He says that he searched your browsing history by accident. He had been searching for ex-girlfriends on your Facebook page, and when he went to delete his browsing history, he saw what you had done. You wonder if he believes his own lies, or if he just wants you to.
Then you remember how he had casually thrown into conversation terms like “gaslighting” hours after you learned what it meant. You remember your phone unplugged and the screen locked from too many failed password attempts when you returned to bed after going to the bathroom in the middle of the night. You remember the invoices in your shred box had been moved, the business cards on your desk askew. You remember the tightness in your chest, like someone flattening a stress ball.
When you descend the mountain to return to your car, you tell him you remember when he read your journal. He says yes, I thought you were going to have an abortion. No, you say, you thought the baby wasn’t yours. No, he says, I couldn’t tell if you wanted to keep the baby. You’re so unreadable.
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Dr. Anne Greenawalt is the founder and editor-in-chief of Sport Stories Press. Her writing has been published by Aethlon: Journal of Sport Literature, Autofocus Lit Mag, Words & Sports, WOW! Women on Writing, and others. She’s a freelance writer and teaches writing and communication studies at universities in Pennsylvania.