Dark Divide (September 18)
This came to me tonight after wine at dinner and a bourbon nightcap. It’s for the writing prompt Dark Divide.
https://similarworlds.com/literature/creative-writing/5385461-September-Writing-Prompts-For-the-writers-out-there
I had help with it - collaboration can bring out so much more than writing solo; it can help you find the words and theme you want to convey. Note: It’s long and lyrical, but it tells a story. :)
⸻
The Dark Divide
Some people meet and something just clicks. But this, this was different. This was recognition at a cellular level, like my soul opened its eyes for the first time in years and whispered, “Oh. There you are.”
I’ve been married to Daniel for 26 years, and I love him completely. He’s a judge now, with a mind that dissects arguments until nothing extraneous remains. The weight of his decisions shapes lives, and the way he delivers them - measured, steady, unshakable - still gives me chills. We chose not to have children, which has made our life beautifully selfish—vintages that linger on the tongue, spontaneous trips across the world, art too provocative for innocent eyes, and conversations that stretch until dawn.
Daniel gets me. We are equals, confidants, lovers who still find ways to surprise each other after all this time. Our marriage isn’t broken, nor lacking - it is ours, with the kind of steady rhythms you only build through decades of devotion.
And then there’s Stephen.
I met him at a gallery opening ten years ago. I was transfixed by a late Van Gogh - brushstrokes swirling like storms contained on canvas - when I heard a voice beside me, “He painted these with such raw emotion, you can feel his heartbreak in every stroke.”
I turned, and there he was. Eyes that didn’t just look, but saw, as if he already knew I was the kind of person who could stand before a painting for 20 minutes and drown in its ache.
“Most people walk past in 30 seconds,” I said.
“Most people don’t understand that art is supposed to change you,” he replied.
And just like that, the world tilted. I didn’t realize it then, but that was the moment the dark divide opened beneath us - a quiet fault line that’s never stopped humming under the surface of my life.
Stephen is married, too. His wife, Lisa, is a CMO with a brilliance for predicting sales shifts before anyone else sees the change. He’s a financial analyst, of course he is. He sees patterns everywhere, finds poetry in numbers, beauty in the rise and fall of economies. When he speaks about markets, it sounds like sonnets.
For ten years, we’ve crossed paths: wine tastings where the bottles cost more than some cars, dinners where art and politics are dissected like courses, gallery openings where the conversations are as sharp as the champagne. And in this world, Stephen and I became known for our intensity. People lean in as if watching a match, following the volley of our ideas, sensing the undercurrent that neither of us names.
“You two have such fascinating discussions,” someone said at a dinner once. I caught Stephen’s gaze across the table, and it was so charged I had to excuse myself before the air betrayed me.
We text, but carefully, deliberately. A decade’s worth of restraint and coded language. Lines of poetry. Song lyrics that mean everything and nothing. Images of places that ache with memory. Sometimes months pass with silence, but then a single message arrives and it’s like no time has passed at all. Last week he sent me Neruda: “I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.” I answered: “Some people feel like coming home. Others feel like adventure.”
The truth is, I’ve thought of him constantly, not with guilt, but with the same anticipation you feel for an approaching holiday. Warm, electric, threaded through the ordinary. One moment I’m planning retirement with Daniel; the next, I’m wondering whether Stephen has read the book I mentioned, or if he’s seen the exhibit I ache to share with him.
Our connection lives in stolen glances, in a language of restraint. And yet, it has survived marriages, relocations, career shifts, entire seasons of our lives. That’s the gravity of it. The persistence. The dark divide has become its own geography, a place we inhabit together even as our bodies remain apart.
Still, the wanting is a storm. Not just desire - though his gaze makes my skin ignite - but the deeper craving: to be wholly known. To be seen in the places Daniel loves me but cannot fully reach. The part of me that reads poetry at midnight, that breathes in beauty like oxygen, that aches for meaning in the way light breaks over water.
A few weeks ago, we “accidentally” arrived at the same wine bar. He sat at one end, I at the other, yet the air between us pulsed with awareness. When I lifted my glass, savoring, his eyes held mine with such intensity I almost forgot how to swallow.
Later, waiting for our cars, he stood close enough for me to breathe in his cologne, subtle, expensive, and now forever tied to wanting what I cannot have.
“This is dangerous,” I murmured.
“I know,” he said, not stepping back. “But some things are worth the risk of feeling, even if you never act on them.”
That is where we live: inside the dark divide - between thought and action, longing and possession. A place where love becomes shadowed, heightened, dangerous, and yet impossibly alive. We’ve built an intimacy that flourishes without touch, a devotion carved from boundaries we both honor.
Tonight, I’ll return to Daniel, to our rituals, to the comfort of the life we’ve built. That is love, real and steady. But tomorrow, Stephen will send something - perhaps a line of verse, perhaps a fragment of music - that reminds me the heart can hold more than one truth at a time.
I’m learning love is not finite. That you can be wholly committed to one life and still recognize another soul as inevitable. Some connections exist outside rules, outside reason, ancient, ungovernable, infinite.
What Stephen and I share is profound and impossible, devastating and exquisite. It belongs to the dark divide, to the space between heartbeats, the pause between longing and fulfillment, the charged silence of almost.
And maybe that’s enough.
Maybe that’s everything.
https://similarworlds.com/literature/creative-writing/5385461-September-Writing-Prompts-For-the-writers-out-there
I had help with it - collaboration can bring out so much more than writing solo; it can help you find the words and theme you want to convey. Note: It’s long and lyrical, but it tells a story. :)
⸻
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The Dark Divide
Some people meet and something just clicks. But this, this was different. This was recognition at a cellular level, like my soul opened its eyes for the first time in years and whispered, “Oh. There you are.”
I’ve been married to Daniel for 26 years, and I love him completely. He’s a judge now, with a mind that dissects arguments until nothing extraneous remains. The weight of his decisions shapes lives, and the way he delivers them - measured, steady, unshakable - still gives me chills. We chose not to have children, which has made our life beautifully selfish—vintages that linger on the tongue, spontaneous trips across the world, art too provocative for innocent eyes, and conversations that stretch until dawn.
Daniel gets me. We are equals, confidants, lovers who still find ways to surprise each other after all this time. Our marriage isn’t broken, nor lacking - it is ours, with the kind of steady rhythms you only build through decades of devotion.
And then there’s Stephen.
I met him at a gallery opening ten years ago. I was transfixed by a late Van Gogh - brushstrokes swirling like storms contained on canvas - when I heard a voice beside me, “He painted these with such raw emotion, you can feel his heartbreak in every stroke.”
I turned, and there he was. Eyes that didn’t just look, but saw, as if he already knew I was the kind of person who could stand before a painting for 20 minutes and drown in its ache.
“Most people walk past in 30 seconds,” I said.
“Most people don’t understand that art is supposed to change you,” he replied.
And just like that, the world tilted. I didn’t realize it then, but that was the moment the dark divide opened beneath us - a quiet fault line that’s never stopped humming under the surface of my life.
Stephen is married, too. His wife, Lisa, is a CMO with a brilliance for predicting sales shifts before anyone else sees the change. He’s a financial analyst, of course he is. He sees patterns everywhere, finds poetry in numbers, beauty in the rise and fall of economies. When he speaks about markets, it sounds like sonnets.
For ten years, we’ve crossed paths: wine tastings where the bottles cost more than some cars, dinners where art and politics are dissected like courses, gallery openings where the conversations are as sharp as the champagne. And in this world, Stephen and I became known for our intensity. People lean in as if watching a match, following the volley of our ideas, sensing the undercurrent that neither of us names.
“You two have such fascinating discussions,” someone said at a dinner once. I caught Stephen’s gaze across the table, and it was so charged I had to excuse myself before the air betrayed me.
We text, but carefully, deliberately. A decade’s worth of restraint and coded language. Lines of poetry. Song lyrics that mean everything and nothing. Images of places that ache with memory. Sometimes months pass with silence, but then a single message arrives and it’s like no time has passed at all. Last week he sent me Neruda: “I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.” I answered: “Some people feel like coming home. Others feel like adventure.”
The truth is, I’ve thought of him constantly, not with guilt, but with the same anticipation you feel for an approaching holiday. Warm, electric, threaded through the ordinary. One moment I’m planning retirement with Daniel; the next, I’m wondering whether Stephen has read the book I mentioned, or if he’s seen the exhibit I ache to share with him.
Our connection lives in stolen glances, in a language of restraint. And yet, it has survived marriages, relocations, career shifts, entire seasons of our lives. That’s the gravity of it. The persistence. The dark divide has become its own geography, a place we inhabit together even as our bodies remain apart.
Still, the wanting is a storm. Not just desire - though his gaze makes my skin ignite - but the deeper craving: to be wholly known. To be seen in the places Daniel loves me but cannot fully reach. The part of me that reads poetry at midnight, that breathes in beauty like oxygen, that aches for meaning in the way light breaks over water.
A few weeks ago, we “accidentally” arrived at the same wine bar. He sat at one end, I at the other, yet the air between us pulsed with awareness. When I lifted my glass, savoring, his eyes held mine with such intensity I almost forgot how to swallow.
Later, waiting for our cars, he stood close enough for me to breathe in his cologne, subtle, expensive, and now forever tied to wanting what I cannot have.
“This is dangerous,” I murmured.
“I know,” he said, not stepping back. “But some things are worth the risk of feeling, even if you never act on them.”
That is where we live: inside the dark divide - between thought and action, longing and possession. A place where love becomes shadowed, heightened, dangerous, and yet impossibly alive. We’ve built an intimacy that flourishes without touch, a devotion carved from boundaries we both honor.
Tonight, I’ll return to Daniel, to our rituals, to the comfort of the life we’ve built. That is love, real and steady. But tomorrow, Stephen will send something - perhaps a line of verse, perhaps a fragment of music - that reminds me the heart can hold more than one truth at a time.
I’m learning love is not finite. That you can be wholly committed to one life and still recognize another soul as inevitable. Some connections exist outside rules, outside reason, ancient, ungovernable, infinite.
What Stephen and I share is profound and impossible, devastating and exquisite. It belongs to the dark divide, to the space between heartbeats, the pause between longing and fulfillment, the charged silence of almost.
And maybe that’s enough.
Maybe that’s everything.
51-55, F
