I should be sleeping, but I can’t. I drove an hour in the steady rain to a funeral today. It was for the father of my close friend. She and I met something like 18 years ago when we taught in the same high school then became close and stayed close, even through all of the life that has happened since. I ache for her, of course, but also as I laid down to try and sleep tonight, I had that flash of all the important things we’d seen each other through– job changes and difficult births and small daily crises and big questions and parenting woes and divorce and deaths and now another one. And I ache for time that feels like a freight train sometimes and the way it’s rolled on since we met. The things I want to do over and the things I never want to do again.
The service wasn’t close to home, so I took the day off to be there, and this morning I was on the road a little after 9am watching steady sheets of rain slide down my windshield and turning the music up to drown the rhythm of the wipers. Instead of taking 285 as I expected, my GPS took me across Holcomb Bridge Road to Jimmy Carter Boulevard, past so many old haunts I haven’t seen in nearly 20 years.
I passed the corporate law firm where I worked during the year between undergrad and graduate school. And the McAlister’s Deli across the street where I’d order my turkey and swiss on sourdough and eat it in my car alone so I could listen to Wilco or My Morning Jacket or something else I was equally obsessed with at the time and escape the office I hated so much. When I moved to Atlanta a few months later and began grad school, my roommate and I had a hand-me-down purple couch and a weekly ritual of watching Lost with popcorn and cheap red wine. The law firm let me come back to work on the weekends at an hourly rate completing data entry. As I drove past it today, I remembered that feeling of Sunday afternoons alone in a sea of cubicles entering names on spreadsheets and thinking about how many pages I had left to write when I got home to work on assignments.
As my brain revisited these old scenes, I had the realization I try to avoid thinking about– I was coupled that whole time. All those years, and years before it and years long after it. With the same person. Who became my husband then my ex husband and something now that has changed shape to feel even more ex than ex somehow. This week marks 9 years since I signed divorce papers, and I think I‘m trying not to write about it, but there it is. The thing I need to say but don’t want to say always makes its way to the page if I let it, especially when I don’t want it to.
Nine years is a long time. It happens to be how long I was married and then now it’s also how long I’ve been divorced, though that equation hadn’t occurred to me until I just wrote it down. There is something promising about that symmetry, like maybe I can close the book now.
A few months ago, at the dinner table, my 14 year old son said something I’ve heard adults say about their parents decades after a split: I do not see at all how you and dad were ever married. You are so different. Like so different. I don’t understand it. I can NOT see it. He laughed as he said it, and there was no anger or pain in that statement, all humor and astonishment. But it did make me pause like yes, I know, what the hell was that? But divorce is weird because you still see the person all the time and you can’t just shrug what the hell was that? about 15 years of your life, and I eventually came to realize it’s my job to answer that question for myself even if I don’t want to.
I don’t ever want to write about my divorce again. Yet here I am. I remember four years ago, I went to a summer writing workshop and was working with a well-respected novelist on my book draft and outline, and I said, “I don’t want this to be just another divorce book,” and then she read a chapter and looked at my outline and smiled and said, “Wow I love this. I know what you just said, but I love a good divorce book.” We laughed together at that, but internally I was so annoyed at her. But truthfully it read like a divorce book because I wasn’t done with where it was taking me. For me to write about it without lying to myself, I had to perform an autopsy of my marriage, and once I pulled all those pieces out and got a good look at them, I realized it was never about that at all. It was about the shapes people leave behind when they are gone and the shapes we leave behind when we grow beyond their presence in our lives. Close examinations are uncomfortable. Sometimes the compass needle points to him. Sometimes it points to me. Always it tells me what is true: deep down inside you knew what you knew. Always. And you were too afraid to say it to yourself.
Nine years and one autopsy later, I have zoomed way out to see the whole picture. Our parallel tracks have diverged and I can’t even see his anymore because we aren’t going the same place anyway. I’m no longer interested in what happened or the ribbon that unraveled after it. What’s done is done.
Nine years is a long time and some things I obsessed about in the early days I don’t worry about anymore, but now there is a whole new set of worries: that this decade is leaving me too firmly rooted, too solid, too overwhelming for anyone to ever imagine committing to me. That I have become, or will become, some caricature of a school matron returning to her books every night in her big empty bed. Full of dreams I tell no one. I think deep inside I know I’m not destined to die alone, and I cannot tell you why I know that, but I just do. But also, I didn’t think I’d still be swimming in this place nine years later, and here I am, so what do I know?
Nearly a decade in, I’ve lost count of the number of people I have seen divorce and remarry (and sometimes even divorce again) in the time I have been single. So many. I used to have a lot of judgment about moving too fast, the women who would be in a new relationship immediately after their first one crumbled, but now I see why. It’s so much easier to take a new shape, to mesh with someone else’s shape, when yours is still freshly broken and malleable.
I never write about relationships until they are long over, but I’ll break that rule for a moment to say that I was with someone for most of 2022 and part of 2023 and it was good but not enough, which is maybe another worry I can add to the list and start losing sleep over. That my not enough yearning will doom me to a life alone. But it felt like we stayed on the surface of the water where it's easy and never went any deeper than that. All my usual defenses stayed in place. It was easy, so easy. And to make matters much worse than that, he was kind and generous and he loved me. As did his parents. I could have stayed on easy street and shoved down every feeling I had that said this isn’t right for me and hovered in that narrow space where the Venn diagram of our interests overlapped and ignored the rest. And maybe that’s what a sane single mom who is tired of being single would have done, but depths and depths and depths started rumbling, and I couldn’t do it anymore and finally told him so.
On the Fourth of July, we sat alone in little folding lawn chairs on a hillside at his house watching fireworks in the distance. I remember thinking at the time wow this is really incongruent and sort of hilarious timing, watching fireworks as it all crumbles. But now I see it differently, my own little grand finale to celebrate the finish line. Thunderous noises and streams of glitter across the sky telling me Congrats! You made it with that flame inside of you intact! This is the end! You can go home now!
These two men are two very different men. In a million ways. Their temperaments could not be more opposite. One placed immense pressure on me and one did not. But in both cases, I knew what I knew: that I can’t be happy wading in the shallow end of the pool even if the water is nice there. That something wasn’t right. Fifteen years later, at least I have learned to listen to that voice.
To add to my fears of becoming a lonely old school matron, I have seemingly perfected the single life after nine years of practice. I know how to fill an empty house with noise when I need it and how to settle in the silence when I want it. I know how to make decent meals for one person. I know how to pass the hours and weeks and months and eventually years in a way that makes me forget I’m unpartnered because I fill myself up as I fill these hours. I know how to be alone, how to build a fortress when I need it.
Things I hate: the empty space for an emergency contact on medical forms, walking into school events and performances alone, dealing with car repairs on my own, being the only person to drive my kids around town for extracurricular activities every night of the week, mistakenly being called by his last name when I’ve used my maiden name for nearly a decade now and I am no longer his, making big decisions all alone, the big empty bed.
Things I love: how real and true it feels in our house of three, choosing the menu for dinner every night in my kitchen, every other Friday when the kids are at his house and it’s been a long week and I come home and take a hot bath and sit on the couch with Thai take-out and television in my quiet house that belongs to me, weekend mornings alone when I take my coffee back to bed and write without worrying about waking someone next to me, making big decisions all alone, the big empty bed.
I really didn’t want this to be about divorce. Maybe it isn’t. When I was young, I wanted to marry a poet (eye roll, so original, of course I did) and instead I married a software salesman who loved money and hated poetry. There is no interesting story there. That’s where the compass needle points back to me. When you are 24, you do stupid things, and for many people, the hubris of life as a 20-something is listening to yourself too much and refusing to listen to anyone else. But for me, it was the hubris of listening to everyone but myself and then thinking I could build a life in spite of that by sheer willpower and careful planning. It makes me laugh now to think of all those high school and college years I drove around listening to Tori Amos tell me it’s just an empty cage, girl, if you kill the bird and then that’s exactly what I did.
Yes, I built a life anyway and worked so hard to try and make it work for us. No, I didn’t deserve how he treated me in the end, even on my worst day. Yes, it felt like an obliterating shock when it all shattered. No, I don’t regret it because it gave me my kids. Yes, there are memories that still haunt me, but they are fading. No, it wasn’t always bad. Yes, it broke my heart. But I always knew there was some fundamental puzzle piece inside where we saw the world entirely differently. I always knew. Like that tale about the princess and the pea. That little puzzle piece was buried under the layers of the life we’d built, and I could feel it.
I don’t know everything though, and I’m sure of that. I don’t know what’s yet to unfold for me. One thing I definitely didn’t know is that nine years later would find me here, still writing about it though I tried not to. Detached from it and shaped by it and still single. I thought this would just be a season of my life, not a long running show where the writers are growing tired. Or to use another metaphor, as much as I love the depths, I never wanted to be in this ocean in the first place and certainly not this long, but at least I taught myself how to swim.
loved this 💕
9 years—how can it be?
Your writing always hits me deeply and this one especially spoke to me. The autopsy. Yes….ugh.
But also I thought again of the irony that once upon a time 14 (!!) years ago this month I sobbed my story at your dining room table as he took pictures and acted sympathetic. Only for it to be you at my table 5 years later…and that made me call him choice words in my head again.
I am proud of you and where you are, who you are, all that you know today.