March 28, 2011, 4:19 pm

“I wanted a perfect ending… Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity.”

--Gilda Radner

Her first piece of artwork was still hanging on their refrigerator. Their – and Pam had to laugh at herself sometimes because little things like the word their still made her smile, made her skin flush and warm. It was ridiculous really. After three years of marriage it should have been like second nature. Yes, it was their refrigerator, in their kitchen, in their apartment. Get over it. It was just a normal, everyday kitchen appliance. Lots of people have refrigerators.

She couldn’t help those little things though. Like the feeling she got whenever she came home at night and he was already there making dinner, moving around the kitchen in bare feet and he would kiss her and ask her how her day was. Or the fact that he could still make her blush when he touched her, looked at her in that way. And three years- after three years she should be over that, right? Or maybe that would never stop. Maybe his smile would always send a little thrill down her spine and she liked that idea, liked that as well as they knew each other, as much as they could second guess each other and complete each other’s sentences and look across a room at each other and – despite all that, certain things would always be new and thrilling.

From the beginning – and sometimes it didn’t seem fair talk about the beginning of their relationship or whatever it was at the beginning. She wasn’t really sure when it began – when they became Jim and Pam. For so long she had been Pam and Roy so it doesn’t really seem fair to discount that. It wasn’t from the first moment. When she first walked into that office he was just the first friendly face, sometimes the only friendly face – at least the only sane face – and it was because of that that she was able to deal with Michael and “Dunder Mifflin this is Pam” and the dirty looks from Dwight and Angela. Maybe she knew that he felt the same suffocating, sinking feeling each time he walked into the office too.

When did they become Jim and Pam? She asked herself that question and found herself backtracking through years of memories and words and looks and smiles, through a whole landscape of moments that had begun to blur together through time - And it’s weird, strange really, the way memory works. The way memories change and stories change. Those stories that have been told over and over – those memories that have been relived a thousand times – they change as life changes. They become more than memory. Those times that she promised herself she would never forget, every little detail locked tight in her mind and then one day… There are only the feelings, brought on by a simple smell, a smile, a word. She couldn’t remember all those moments – all those moments that made them Jim and Pam - sometimes all she had left was feeling.

There was one moment though – and the details were foggy because she couldn’t remember what she and Roy fought about or why she had sat at Jim’s desk. But he had walked in on her crying, had said something about Roy and she had slapped him for saying the things that ran through her mind almost every day. That moment was just – it wasn’t because he cared about her and made her laugh- it was because – okay, it sounds so stupid to think about. Stupid and childish but who didn’t pretend when they were younger? Pretend and imagine and dream? And really, it was all her mom’s fault for reading The Secret Garden to her in the first place, filling her head with magical ideas and fantasies. She and her friends would run around in the back yard and find those spaces under low hanging tree branches and pretend and dream and imagine. A whole new world. A secret place. Somewhere no one could find her – and yeah it was stupid. Especially because at twenty-six she was still looking for it, that place where no one could find her, where she could exist beyond reality, beyond rationality and responsibility. And Jim… when she was with Jim…

That moment in the office, late at night had been the first time she had felt it, felt the way she could get lost with him, in him. Because they did create a little world for themselves, a world were there was no deadline to get expense reports done and no fear of downsizing and no monotony – she hated, hated, hated “Dunder Mifflin this is Pam.” But when she was with Jim…

Of course they couldn’t keep the world at bay. They couldn’t keep it all away from them – as hard as they tried to believe they could exist inside each other and just forget about everything else. Just because they loved each other didn’t mean that there was an automatic happy ending. Just because they had fought so hard and worked so hard and – suppose Romeo and Juliet had lived. Suppose that in the end they had found a way to be together. Would they have been happy? Maybe they would have gotten divorced after two years because Romeo left the toilet seat up and Juliet hogged the covers and in real life shit like that happens. In real life the story doesn’t end at happily ever after, there are no end credits – well, maybe at the end. The actual end.

Pam leaned her head back against the bed. Her hands were shaking and she tucked them in against her knees, took a deep breath, tried not to think. She didn’t want to think those thoughts. Not at that moment. This moment.

He was sitting next to her, completely still, staring straight ahead and she wanted to ask him what he was thinking. She didn’t though – she already had a pretty good idea.

Those thoughts about a fucking happily ever after kept invading her mind. She thought about their wedding day on the beach, how it had rained, how neither of them had cared. How it seemed at that moment that nothing could ever really go wrong and even if it did – what did it even matter?

Sure, her idea of a happily ever after had changed over the years. Like Emily said at the reception dinner – if she got what she had wanted when she was seven she would have married Mark Paul Gosselaar and worn a hoop dress with puffed sleeves. Things change. And somehow, somewhere her fairy-tale, her happily ever after began to look something more like a rain soaked beach and the back room of a restaurant where she danced her first dance with Jim dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt. And the way he looked at her – the way her family laughed and talked around them – nothing had ever felt so right.

He had taken her to Europe for their honeymoon. They had traveled all over the continent for four weeks with no real plan, no set destination and there was something about being lost with Jim on a completely different continent that made her wonder if that other part of her life had ever really existed. Together – they were lost in this world they had created for themselves – this place that no one else could touch.

It’s a funny thing about reality though… Pam looked up at a picture on their dresser. Jim had his arms wrapped around her and they were both smiling widely at the camera. She couldn’t even remember exactly when it had been taken. Sometime before…

Three months after they had gotten back from their honeymoon her dad had gotten sick. The doctors said –

It was fast. There really wasn’t anything to do but just wait for it to happen and sometimes (most times) the feel of Jim’s fingers against hers as she cried in some stark hospital waiting room wasn’t enough. How could it be enough? How can anything…?

The only thing she was able to think about at the funeral was that time he taught her to drive stick and how she had gotten frustrated and yelled at him and…

She doesn’t want to think these things. She doesn’t want to remember… remember… remember…

Jim had been laid off the next January and if it hadn’t been so – well, unfunny, it would have been almost funny. All those years at Dunder- Mifflin under that same threat and one day he walked into his office and “They appreciated his service for the company but…”

It had been two months before he was able to find another job – something low paying, starting level, degrading as all hell and she knew he hated it, knew that he hated the fact that they had had to move into a smaller apartment, knew that he hated that she had keep her receptionist job at the publication company and give up the free time she spent on art.

Not that everything was all bad. She couldn’t look back on those days and hate them and regret them. Yes, she missed her father so much that there were times she couldn’t breath and sometimes they had to eat cereal for dinner because there just wasn’t enough money and they were both working jobs they hated again. But in between fighting with the landlord over rent checks and searching the want ads and driving back to her childhood home and crying with her mom – and when she thinks about all that maybe it is too much – but they always found this way to curl up in bed together and laugh at themselves and true, they fought and bickered over things like who forgot to buy toilet paper and who left the refrigerator door open but they were always able to fall into each other… find each other.

His hand wrapped around hers and she closed her eyes. This moment wasn’t supposed to be like this. This moment wasn’t supposed to be about… everything that it was and she couldn’t help it, couldn’t help going back to that place, to those memories…

Jim wanted a girl. Pam wanted a boy. They talked about names and room colors and finally moving out of the city. On her birthday Jim had come home with a custom made baby tee-shirt that said, “Dunder-Mifflin this is…” and she had hit him with the box it came in until he laughed and cried for mercy.

At night his hands would find their way to her stomach and she would swat him away playfully and tell him it was too early to feel anything even though he swore that he could.

And then…

She could feel his hand warm and tight around hers and it was almost too tight but she didn’t say anything. He was thinking about the same thing – she could tell by the way his eyes were squeezed shut – by the way his breath was coming in short little gasps through his nose.

It was too much to think about and she wanted to remember that day at the beach and what he looked like in the rain or some time – any time in Europe when he had introduced her as his wife and they had grinned at each other like a couple of idiots. Anything but…

There was a crack in the ceiling above their bed. Just a small crack really that wormed its way down a couple of inches, splintering the white paint into little flakes.

She wondered why she had never noticed that before, wondered if there were any other cracks around the apartment that she hadn’t seen. Part of her wanted to get up and check, walk around and examine all the walls and corners. She would report it to the super. Maybe he would reduce their rent.

Her body felt so heavy though when she tried to move from the bed and it was odd – odd when she felt so empty, so…

Was there even a feeling to describe that?

The blinds were drawn and the room was getting darker. Not completely dark. There was just enough light that she could still see her surroundings. Dark enough that she couldn’t quite make out the pictures on the dresser. She figured that maybe that would be a good way to describe that feeling. This room. She felt like this room in the semi darkness.

There’s a song about that isn’t there?

The door opened and she almost expected the light from the other room to come spilling in but it was dark in there too and Jim shut the door again and it only got darker.

He sat on the edge of the bed with his elbows on his knees and his head bowed and she stared at his back.

“I umm…” His voice cracked and he had to stop and she thought that maybe the sound of his voice breaking could describe how she was feeling.

It was a moment before he continued, “I called my mom and your mom. They said… they’ll call everyone else.”

Pam nodded and let her eyes flutter shut. She thought about that scene in One-Hundred and One Dalmatians where all the dogs spread the message throughout the city about the missing puppies. She wanted to laugh because it was just so ridiculous to think about something like that.

“Fuck.”

The word hit her and everything inside tensed.

“Fuck… Pam… I don’t…”

She didn’t either… she didn’t…

He turned around then and stretched out next to her without quite touching and they watched the ceiling together.

“There’s a crack… I just noticed it…”

She pointed and let her hand drop down to the bed. She wondered if he even saw it because he was looking at her and there were tears sliding down his face.

“Yeah… I’ll talk to the super about that tomorrow.”

If she turned around a little she would see that the crack was still there. But she kept looking straight ahead and it wasn’t until Jim turned to look at her, his face changing, softening, that she realized that there were tears slipping silently down her cheeks.

And it wasn’t supposed to be like this. It wasn’t supposed to hurt so much and yeah, they had both decided a long time ago that it would never be perfect, it would never all just work out but – why did it have to hurt so much?

After she lost the baby she had retreated into a place inside, that place she had always existed in before – and maybe she just needed to for awhile and maybe he understood that because he didn’t try to reach her – at first.

Maybe their marriage could have fallen apart and maybe the whole idea of any kind of fairy tale could have been blown to bits. But that just – somehow she always knew they would get through it, that there was something more at the end that was worth it. Maybe.

Yes it hurt, yes it hurt so fucking bad that sometimes she couldn’t – sometimes he couldn’t see straight. Each day though the hurt was a little less, the pain was a little less and he kept trying to reach her until one day - the touch of his hand sometimes was enough.

They celebrated their second anniversary in their pajamas with Chinese takeout and three games of Scrabble – which she always tried to cheat at, much to his annoyance. And that – sometimes those little moments, those little imperfect moments told her that no matter what…

The timer rang and her eyes flew open. Jim looked at her and she shook her head furiously.

“I can’t…”

He nodded and gave her hand a squeeze before getting up and walking into the bathroom.

Life… oh God… life could be a bitch sometimes. Those happily-ever-afters, they’re so rare and so few between and maybe the real problem is that for so long she believed it was possible. She believed that all those dreams and imaginations and childhood games of pretend could be real.

But Jim wasn’t prince charming and this apartment wasn’t a castle and every happy, wonderful moment would eventually end and something else… anything else could happen and if the past three years had proven anything it was that…

He walked out of the bathroom with the little white stick in his hand and he was doing that thing where he was trying not to smile and he didn’t even have to say anything before she dropped her head into her hands and burst into tears.

“Hey… hey…”

His arms were around her and his lips were on her forehead and she couldn’t look at him. Absolutely could not look at him.

“I can’t… I can’t…”

“Shh.”

Her body was racked with sobs and she wondered briefly if she had even cried like this when... and she wasn’t even sure how long she cried, how long he held her in his arms and cried with her but when she finally looked back up at him the room was already beginning to get dark.

Jim wiped at the tears on cheeks and she tried to smile at him through swollen eyes, her face red and splotchy, her breath still coming in uneven little hiccups.

“You look beautiful.”

Pam rolled her eyes, “Oh shut up.”

He laughed and she wondered if maybe the sound of his laughter could describe the way she felt.

“I don’t know if I can do this again.”

“Yeah.” He looked down at her hands and whispered, “I think you can.”

“What if… I mean, I want… but…”

Jim nodded, “One day at a time. We take it one day at a time.”

She sighed, let the air fill her lungs, her body, let that little glimmer of excitement grow inside her again.

One day at a time. One day at a time.