Together Apart: Change is Never Easy by Lexi Maxxwell Page A

anxiety, never about how to earn or spend it. Nothing said was ever vicious, and barely unkind. They had simply grown apart, and both knew it. But that was good, in a way, because it meant that no bridges had been crossed, and certainly none had been burned. They weren’t like two neighbors fighting over the placement of a fence. They were two neighbors who used to invite one another over for dinners on the lawn, but had fallen from the habit. There was, in other words, nothing for Zach and Sam to repair, per se. They simply had to look deep inside themselves and rediscover that desire to invite the other in.  
    Zach thought about the baby.  
    He didn’t want to be a parody of himself. He didn’t want them, as a couple, to make the same mistakes as everyone else. Watching some couples was like watching the stupid kids in a slasher movie, heading into the dark basement where the killer waited. Why didn’t those kids get out of the house and run? And why, when faced with an unsalvageable marriage, didn’t both parties get out while they could? They seized on dumb reasons to stay together, twisting the killer’s knife without realizing they were. Babies were one of those. It was almost a cliché: A baby will bring us together .  
    But this felt different. It was different. This baby wasn’t glue. This baby wasn’t duct tape over a crack in a basement foundation. This baby, Zach felt certain, was the simple reminder they needed. The baby was God (or whoever; he hadn’t decided and neither had his wife) tapping him on the shoulder:  
    This is what you should be paying attention to.
    Not his stupid graphic design job. Not his flagging artistic ability, which was surely caused by a lack of ambition — which, in turn, was caused by the fact that he felt more like a graphic designer these days than a groundbreaking artist. Yes, he’d been living rather neatly inside the box. But so what? There was the woman he loved to consider, and the baby they were having together.  
    Zach walked down the sidewalk, feeling himself again for perhaps the first time since coming to Memphis. He kept his head high rather than down and focused. He looked up to inhale the blue sky. Early on, Sam used to tell him that his head was perpetually in the clouds. Not so recently. Zach had been a responsible boy, his feet on the ground and eyes on the prize. But as he made his way back home with the flowers in one hand and the box of cherry cordials in the other, he let his head float like it once did.
    Zach dropped his sense of responsibility to reality. He didn’t need to see things as they were; reality would get along just fine while he was floating through the clouds, feeling stupid and optimistic and inspired. And as Zach walked and felt high, as he thought about the reminder in Sam’s belly and how exciting their future together would be, he started to feel inspired again. It wasn’t much — a memory of brushstrokes here, a palate of mental colors there — but it was something. Since they’d moved, Zach felt like art was something he had to do, like jogging. You jogged to stay fit, and you did it whenever you could shoehorn it in because it was something you had to swallow, like a pill. His art used to feel like play. He used to vanish inside his Portland studio, emerging an unknowable eon later with paint on his hands or clay bits somehow in his hair. He’d get cuts when he worked with metal and never knew how he’d gotten them. He’d look at finished pieces and barely recall their assembly. He could remember the music playing when he’d worked in a particular area of any given canvas, but was still surprised by what had occurred there. It wasn’t like that lately. Zach missed the creative fugue, where things happened as if of on their own. But right now, if he didn’t have flowers and the long, long missed chocolates to deliver, Zach thought he would be in his studio. You had to strike while the iron was hot — make hay when