I poured the coffee like I'd done a thousand Tuesdays before. He was at the table, not reading anything, just looking out the window where the bird feeder hung empty and the rain had started its soft, deliberate work.
We'd been married twelve years that month. Not the rough twelve years they warn you about — no infidelity, no cruelty, no bankruptcy or grief that reshaped the borders of the house. Just a long, slow drift toward roommate. Toward courtesy. Toward two people who loved each other the way you love a city you grew up in but no longer live near.
He said: "I think I forgot how to flirt with you."
I laughed. Reflex. The way you laugh when someone says something that lands too close. He didn't laugh back. He just kept looking out the window and added, more quietly, "I want to learn it again."
What we did next
We did a small, almost embarrassingly small, thing. We made a rule that for thirty days, neither of us was allowed to ask the other about logistics — about who was picking up the kid, what was for dinner, whether the gutters had been cleaned, whether the dog needed her shot. Anything administrative had to go in a shared note on his phone. The rest of the time, we had to talk to each other like we'd just met.
It was awful for about four days. We were rusty and self-conscious. He kept asking where the kid's permission slip was, and I kept telling him to write it down, and he kept telling me to also write it down, and we sounded like two CEOs in a custody battle.
Then a strange thing happened. On the fifth night, he asked me what I'd been thinking about that day. Not what I'd done. What I'd been thinking. And I had to actually search for the answer, because no one had asked me that in maybe a decade.
Marriage doesn't die from the big things. It dies from a thousand unmade invitations. A thousand questions you stopped asking because you assumed you already knew the answer.
Where we are now
It has been six months. We are not, I want to be clear, suddenly newlyweds. We still have the same dishwasher, the same parents, the same complaints about the same toll road. But we have something we hadn't had in a long time: curiosity. He doesn't know everything about me. He knows the version of me from 2017, and 2019, and the long blur of the pandemic. He's only just starting to meet the version that exists this Tuesday, in this kitchen, in this rain.
And I'm only just starting to flirt back.
— Fin —