Time didn’t want to move.
Streaks of light cut over the darkened ceiling, slowly growing like vines. Slowly consuming what remained of night in my room. Slowly consuming what time remained of my current life.
I hadn’t slept. Not that it would have mattered.
Eyes open. Eyes closed. Everything I saw remained the same. Sleep would only speed everything along.
I wanted it over with. I wanted it to remain the same. To go back to how things were.
The alarm sounded. The first of several I set. Not to wake me up. To remind me of what little time I had left. With every alarm, less time remained. In just a few hours, there’d be no need for alarms. Time would be up.
One foot out of bed, then the other. It would be the last time I’d step out of bed a married man.
Invisible Cuts
I hung up the phone.
A surge of heat flooded my body. It whispered to me to throw the phone. Smash it into a million pieces. Take everything out on the phone.
I didn’t.
I set the phone down on the computer desk, then sat quietly on the futon of my basement office. The cement floor cold on my feet. The gray winter light cast in from the small window did nothing to warm me.
I sat, heat consumed by a numbing I’d never felt before. An ice bath from a chilled heart. I looked at the wall. Through the wall. To nothing and yet everything.
Silence lasted for a frozen moment. It could have been a few seconds. It could have been hours. I don’t know. The chill took hold, my body shook, and I cried.
The cold of the room failed to lend comfort. Thickening clouds coddled the dimming sun until it no longer cast any light into the room. And yet I still cried. Tears cutting and re-cutting salted trenches down skin and collected in hair. Every time I thought I’d flushed the last moisture from my soul, my dehydrated brain thought of the phone conversation. Of my wife finally saying the words neither had the courage to say for so long.
That we needed a divorce.
And then the tears would flow again. My memories of what was and my dreams of what could have been rung my heart and mind free of a thought-of future, expelling it all through tears and sobs.
Eventually, I couldn’t take anymore and my body succumbed to sleep. The cold cement floor touching my foot the only reminder of being alive.
When The End Has No Conclusion
Several months later, after the phone call, I forced myself out of bed, one foot at a time, the last time I’d wake as a married man.
I had to prepare for court. To finalize it all.
The hours up to our court appearance dragged, and yet it was over in an instant. The judge said something to us, I don’t remember what. I wasn’t listening, my mind unable to focus. My wife’s charming laughter centered me back into the room. The bubbly milkshake of a laugh. Like the two-straw-one-glass milkshake we shared during our 1950s engagement photo session. Her flowing dress and my James Dean jacket. The chrome counter-top of the era-specific diner. The metal reflected the red of her lipstick and the bow and the cherry and--
“-Do you understand?”
I looked to the judge and nodded, then replied that I did. The fog of our engagement photos lifted and replaced with wood paneling and a tired judge. He signed some forms on his desk, said a few words, then clapped his gavel.
That was it.
The end.
Someone handed paperwork back to us. I took it but didn’t look over it. Numbness returned. Emptiness.
I walked out of the courthouse like walking out of a movie with an unsatisfying ending. There was no conclusion. No closure. It simply stopped.
The end didn’t feel like an end, but there was nothing left. Like going through death with nothing on the other side.
I drove her back to the airport. She asked if we should get food. I said no and she agreed. Neither hated the other. At one point in time, we were perfectly connected, but even zippers snag and disconnect. We had no way of correcting it.
We continued like strangers with an intimate connection with the other. She cried at one point during the drive. I cried at another.
I don’t know if we cried because it was over, because dreams were no more, or because there was no end. We were and then we weren’t. Maybe all three. Maybe none.
Sometimes the end doesn’t feel like an end, and that might be the most difficult part. Because to move on there needs to be closure, and when there’s no immediate closure it’s necessary to construct it, piece by piece. Memory by memory. It slows recovery to a crawl as a conclusion is forged. But a crawl is still a crawl, and a conclusion to the end will come.
It just takes time.