The Fall That Broke More Than My Body

 I remember exactly when the shift began.

Not when the distance became undeniable.
Not when the late nights started.
Not when trust began to shake.

Before all of that —
there was a fall.

Winter. Snow. A simple chore left undone.
I stepped outside to grab the garbage bins, phone tucked to my ear, chatting with him,
and my foot hit ice.

My body went up.
My world went down.

Back first, then head — the kind of impact that steals breath before it gives pain.
My phone vanished into a snowbank.
The first reaction I heard was concern but it quickly turned to anger.

Not anger at me, not really.
Just anger at the fact I got hurt at all.
Anger at our daughter for the chore left undone.
He can't handle my pain, at least my physical pain. Not since Covid hit me so hard he had to take and leave me at the hospital. 

My husband doesn't break. He doesn't cry. 
Crying is for babies. 

But he cried that night. 

So, he doesn't handle things well when something physically hurts me again. 

I told myself I was fine.
I always tell myself I’m fine.
I bandaged myself in denial and ibuprofen and old survival instincts.

But I wasn’t fine.

A concussion, almost certainly, untreated.
And then the pain that came days later — sharp, electric, unrelenting.
It felt like someone plugged my face into a live wire.

Seven months of pain.
Seven months of confusion, doctor visits, medications, and surrendering pieces of my life.
Seven months of barely functioning when I used to create, move, be someone.

Finally, a name:
Trigeminal neuralgia.

The medicine for it gave me a life back… just enough to see what I’d lost.

Because somewhere between the pain and the silence and the slowing down,
I slipped into a depression I didn’t see coming until I was already drowning in it.

The body breaks first.
Then the spirit follows.

And in that darkness, I learned something I wish I didn’t:

My husband does not know how to sit with pain —
especially mine.

Tears make him uncomfortable.
Grief overwhelms him.
Needing him seemed to push him farther away.

So I stopped needing.
I stopped speaking.
I got small — smaller than I had been in years.

I let myself disappear quietly because I didn’t know what else to do.
Because if I couldn’t be “fun” or “strong” or “easy,”
I didn’t know if I deserved to take up space at all.

The world kept moving.
He kept moving.

And I stayed still — broken body, broken coping, broken confidence,
watching the life I’d built move on without me.

Looking back, I think that fall was more than a physical accident.

It was the moment life ripped the momentum away,
sat me down in my body and my pain,
and whispered:

You cannot outrun what hurts forever.

I didn’t know it then, but that fall wasn’t just the beginning of physical recovery.

It was the beginning of awakening —
the slow, painful realization that something between us had shifted,
and I couldn’t pretend I didn’t feel it anymore.