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Read an excerpt from Rachel Simon's Building a Home with my Husband (Continued...)

Now we both sigh, and again, I can't find words. But this time it's for a reason other than shock, and Hal knows exactly what it is. No two people can live entwined for years and not come to read whole Rosetta stones in t he silences, glances, and head tilts that outsiders wouldn't even register. Hal and I generally delight in this phenomenon, and have even jokingly given it names—Friendship Wi-Fi, The Collective Consciousness of Kin, Marriage Mind Meld. But neither of us is amused now. Our relationship clairvoyance has moved on from the burglary to our one huge problem. A seventeen hundred square foot problem that isn't going away.

Finally Hall says, "I'm going to get a replacement for the basement door. It'll be secure by the time you get home."

"Thanks. But—" Don't say it, I tell myself, as the flight attendants check that the passengers' seat belts are buckled. Hold your tongue. But the shake in my body is now coursing so mightily in the opposite direction that my mouth just won't stop. "I mean, there are many other things I haven't liked," I say. "Now I won't even feel safe in that house."

Then I lock my lips, and without a word we go through it all over again. The house. The one quarrel we've had since he carried me over its threshold. It's ironic, because the house—or, really, any house—is such an unlikely dispute for us. When we met, I was twenty-three, he thirty, and neither of us thought about owning a house. An aspiring writer with low-paying jobs that meant little to me, I was content scribbling stories in the libraries. Hal, in the apprenticeship of his architectural career, and at his own low-paying jobs, spent his off-hours at home practicing guitar. Home ownership was as absurd as time travel—and not only because of our callings or income.

The truth was that I couldn't commit to him. I loved him, he loved me, we were utterly compatible, but something I had yet to understand kept me from saying that he was The One. Nonetheless, we so enjoyed being together that after a year of spending every night in his or my dumpy Philadelphia apartment, we moved into our own dumpy Philadelphia apartment together. Five years later, after savoring everything from our vegetarianism to our fondness for offbeat films and modern art, we rented a modest house in the suburbs. But I felt no closer to what I wanted to feel. I groped toward advice, but each friend contradicted the last, and therapists mostly said, "Tell me more about your family." Hal grew aloof, sometimes patronizing; I burrowed into writing and friends. Eventually the highlight of our time together was zoning out before the TV, numbing ourselves with pizza. When I was alone, thoughts assaulted me: I have to leave! But he's so funny and caring and smart. I have to find The One! But how can I hurt him? My head felt caught between two crashing cymbals. I developed rashes. I ground my teeth in my sleep. And finally, after thirteen years—I know, thirteen years—we called it quits. For the next six years, I lived in rented rooms, over garages, in basements. I dated a little, but mostly I was alone. Hal was so convinced he'd failed at love that he didn't even try to date. He took up Buddhism and environmental sustainability and eventually became a first-time homeowner—of the very house we're not talking about now.

He says, "We'll deal with the house when you get back."

"Right," I say, as my brain sends him an instant message: This is the final strike.

"We'll work it out."

"Turn off all electronic devices," I hear overhead.

I don't want to end our call like this: stunned about the burglary, agitated about the loss, angry about the house, longing to comfort each other. In the moment we have left, Hal and I hold each other's gaze through the phone. "Love you," he whispers. "Me too," I say. And, remembering how much easier is it for him to say those words—and how accepting he is of why I find love so hard to express—I feel tears come. That's when we hang up.

Then the plane is accelerating down the runway, and I suddenly realize that this moment has launched me into a new leg of my life's journey. I don't want it to. I don't want to have anything to do with whatever awaits: expenditures of time and money to replace the laptop, the return of our debate about moving, and, heaven help us, if we decide to stay and finally renovate, possibly even our hard-won solidarity going up in smoke. I cannot guess that in the end all this will indeed happen, and some of it will be a great trial, though not in any of the ways that I fear, and not only with him. In fact, it will blow open the tight seal around everything I think I know about myself, about family, about the misunderstands and resilience of love; and all my memories and aspirations and regrets and joys will come bursting out, some old beliefs disintegrating, other surviving transformed. But it's only a house, people will tell me, and, with Hal demystifying for me how construction proceeds, step by step, I will not refute that it is. Yet the lessons I get in the physical world of building will, at the same time, deliver so much more: locked rooms leading to the depths of myself, forgotten closets brimming with wrinkled relationships, falling walls exposing conflicts of the past, sudden calamities enlightening my spirit, newborn windows opening their eyes and looking out into the future.

But of course I do not know any of this as the plane tilts up into the sky. I simply feel stiff with anxiety, and envision quarrels stirring beyond the horizon. How different I might feel if I could see past the dust, and glimpse the gems that this journey will reveal.