“Commuter Marriage,” by Erica Hoskins Mullenix

I am not throwing back that far with this photo, but then again, my marriage didn’t last long enough to become a truly historical event fit for circa dates and carbon dating, so here we are with a picture of my husband and me from 2007. Always a long-distance relationship or a commuter marriage, ours was a pairing of sex and errands whenever we were in the same city. This photo was taken the day Q, my husband, helped me clean our pre-marriage apartment from top to bottom. We started with my disastrous closet filled with unpacked boxes from three of my previous moves, then hit the bedroom. Once we were able to see the floor, I broke down in tears, happy and bewildered that this boy could see me at my worst and still want to be with me. Two years later when he left me the first time, it turns out, according to the note he left behind without leaving behind much else of our stuff, my shit being all over the place was one of the things he “couldn’t take” so he wasn’t as much helping me out of my abyss that day as he was building a case against me, but that weekend, it was all love and fucking and the scent of Pine-Sol and clean Berber with us having sex in each room as we went along. We finished with this self-timed shot in the kitchen. Continue reading →