Six months and a Wedding Anniversary

I'll forever remember that terrible day he said, "I have something to tell you..."
"What's going on? You're scaring me. Is it about your new job?" My mind was racing, I wondered if something went wrong and he couldn't start his new job... after six months of unemployment.
"I wish," he said in barely a whisper, and then he told me. That's when a part of me died in a matter of seconds.
January 28th marked six months.
Years ago, when I was eleven, I visited my uncle at his rural farm in Japan, roughly three hundred miles southwest of where the Sendai quake hit. The villagers were a wonderfully opinionated bunch. They asked me all sorts of questions about America for a good hour or so. "Do you like McDonald's?" one toothless man asked and before I could really answer, he declared, "I don't understand what's so good about it! I much prefer curry! Do you like curry?..."
I think of when I was looking up at the summer night sky. Away from all of the lights of civilization, the stars shined in abundance and brightness. Without the benefit of traumatic losses and pain, I only appreciated in my eleven year old mind this moment for its novelty, not necessarily for its profoundly peaceful experience. And yet this is a moment where I often go back mentally to think. On the tatami mats, sliding doors wide open overlooking the moonlit cornfields and craggy outlines of volcanic mountains in the background. The cicadas and frogs collectively making their loud pleas for mates and mosquitoes humming around in the humidity looking for a meal.
That moment strikes a sharp contrast with the emotional battering I've gone through the past six months, so it's not surprising to me that I haven't thought about that time in a long while. I think I'm done with the freakouts of feeling alone and I can actually appreciate my solitude, though I'm not quite ready to become a religious hermit. I'm just really glad to be able to find my balance again more often than I'm a fish flopping around on the parched, searing Mojave Desert ground. The worst seems over, I've absorbed his betrayal, and now when the intrusive thoughts attempt to drag me down, I've learned to distract myself by replacing them with happier memories of the rebuilding process, sort of like yelling, "Squirrel!" to a dog.
I've also escaped most of the nastiness of the anniversaries that were packed into January and February: He saw her last year in January. He started his affair three years ago and it was our fifth wedding anniversary in February. Valentine's day. I don't know how I got through it. From what I've read, these first anniversaries are a bitch. Shouldn't I be pulling out my hair, gnashing my teeth, tearing my clothing?
The Japanese are masters at burying their feelings. Am I doing the same thing? Case in point, on another visit to Japan with my mother when I was sixteen, we brought my father's ashes in a small, nondescript box in one of our suitcases for burial. The Japanese customs official with his crisp white gloves opened this suitcase and pointed at the box, "What's in here?" Without skipping a beat and a chuckle, my mother said, "My husband." The poor guy turned as white as his gloves and ushered us along while profusely apologizing. My mother laughs at this incident, even though she's admitted to crying over the death of her husband while no one was looking. Am I being more Japanese than I think by burying my true feelings? Or maybe I've come to a point of resignation, an acceptance with the realization of "shikataganai," which means "can't be helped." It's a resignation so powerful that even a nuclear attack might elicit a lukewarm, "Oh, that sucks."
This past weekend my husband and I had our anniversary dinner where we had our wedding. It's an outdoor restaurant converted from a tiny church and surrounding grounds nestled in the mountains near the coast. I forgot how beautiful the grounds were and the meal was superb. Unfortunately, I had a head cold so I couldn't taste the food as well as I would have liked. But I enjoyed the beauty of my surroundings more than I ever did because I didn't have the stress of eighty guests to greet at our wedding... as opposed to the stress of a cheating husband. Go figure. We talked about five year goals and one of mine was to "be totally, deeply, completely, utterly in love with my husband." He looked at me, "Aren't you now?" "I am," I paused, "but I'm still hurting." And I cried for about ten seconds before I pulled myself together, held his hand, and dove into the cheesecake. I guess that's a good sign, I'm able to recognize when I'm hurting, but I'm still able to look ahead and see myself healed.
Nothing is the same. I'm forever changed, and I'm not sure what to think about it, just that it's different and I sometimes don't like how I've changed. Like if I were to go back to my uncle's farm today and sit in that room again, it wouldn't be a very good thing to leave the doors wide open and exposing myself to the traces of radiation drifting in from Sendai. And yet the people living there are a resilient bunch. They keep going because they have nowhere else to go. They send their kids to school, go to work, the farmers plant and harvest what they can knowing that much of it will not leave the area because of contamination concerns. In a bizarre way, I see myself understanding why they keep going and following their lead. Not because they have a choice, but "shikataganai."