Dawn looks in through the kitchen window.
It finds a room swallowed by night, blackened oblivion bleeding into view. Only a small table sits, spotlit by the dull grays and violets of a coming day. A stage play for an empty theater.
I enter stage right, coffee cup in hand, and sit to one side of the table. Steam curls upward from the cup. I watch, allowing the steam to linger in the gray light before I snub its life short with a sigh.
I wait.
My wish didn’t come true.
I don’t even know what I wished for, but the steam failed to fulfill it. Not sure what I expected. It never worked on birthday candles either.
I feel the darkness around me more than the light. I’d rather the light remain away. Because every day it returns is another day without--
--I look to the empty chair across from me--
--her.
Divorce papers have replaced where her hands would rest on the table. Where her plate would sit. Where her fingers would tap. The date and signature on the papers are fresher than my coffee grinds. Hopefully what I’m feeling will eventually stale like the taste in my mouth.
I can only hope.
I wait for more steam to curl. Maybe the next wish will come true.
A Death, And Yet, Somehow Worse
Divorce. The end. Where once something of promise stood, now nothing remains but crumbled memories and failed dreams. It’s the death of your relationship. True, it could have been on life-support for years, or you might have just discovered a terminal condition from which it could not recover. And yet no matter how much warning you had to the approaching end, few things can prepare you for the judge signing his name and the time of death of your marriage.
Friends took me to the bar(s) the day of my divorce. To distract from death and celebrate rebirth. For a time a numbed myself. I closed my eyes and pretended like things were okay. It’s easy to forget you’re wet when completely underwater, but sooner or later, you’ll need to come up for air. And when you do, reality sets in with every pulled breath.
The death of a loved one is definite. But the death of a relationship is somehow worse. The person is dead to you but still lives. There’s a person out there who knows everything about you, and yet you can’t call them. You can’t talk about the past. The relationship didn’t end in love, as does the death of a loved one. It ended with despair and hatred. With coldness and frustration. For some, the most important person in your life may now be the person who despises you the most.
It’s death, and yet somehow worse.
The First Year Is The Hardest
Working up to the official end of your marriage, your brain has time to contemplate life on the other side. After all, you’ve done it before. You’ve been on your own. You’ve lived your own life. But even if you were the one to load the gun and pull the trigger on the divorce, nothing can fully prepare you for stepping away from your marriage.
There will be times, instances, moments, where all you can think of is your past love. It’s impossible to know when these experiences are to happen, but when it does, it’s a reminder of what you once had and what is now gone.
It can be a cologne, the way someone greets you on the phone, how someone holds their fork while eating. It can be seeing a movie on TV, a song on the radio, driving past a restaurant. Bread crumbs left behind by your past.
It can be hard to deal with these. Some might bring up warm memories, followed swiftly by a cold chill in your chest. Because you know these are nothing but memories. Memories that will never again be a reality.
Sometimes there’s no warmth. There’s just remembrance of the lost. It might force you into bed early, not to sleep, but to hide your tears from the world. It might send you to the frozen food section, where a second pint of ice cream is grabbed. It might push you to order an extra drink or do things you will fully regret.
Or, if you’re like me, it might push you to do all of those things.
The first year is the hardest, because the wound is fresh, and there’s no way to silence the pain. Only delay it. You can put off the pain for a time, but eventually, it will find you. There’s always a crack. There’s always a way in.
But Things Do Get Better
For weeks, there wasn’t a day I awoke to a dry pillow. To my eyes crusted over and half my nose plugged. If I didn’t go to sleep in tears, dreams of the loss made sure tears were shed while I slept.
And then, one morning, I was okay. I didn’t realize it until later in the morning. That my eyes weren’t crusted. That I could breathe normally.
The dreams stopped. The wondering if things could work out in the future faded. Life returned.
Time is the great purifier. It will filter out the past and, eventually, leave you with something clean and new. It won’t take away what you went through or the life you once lived, but every passed second is a step away from the past.
If you’re going through a breakup, a divorce, a separation, there may be nothing more real than the hurt you feel. And that’s okay. Because there’s no wrong way to morn death.
Just know that, eventually, there’s life on the other side.