Divorce

This time has me sitting as close to center the of my sobriety as I did in the earliest days. I think about it when I wake up, when I make coffee, when I sit on my couch and look at the sun coming up, or the sun-having-already-come-up since my wake up seems to be getting later and later.

A few things I'm thinking about this trip around the sun.

It takes an ocean not to break. What does that actually mean, though? That the force of an ocean holds us together? That the ocean never actually breaks fully, even as the tide breaks over and over? Like all the best poetry and music, I’ve never really examined the meaning too closely.

I’m not going to tell you that you only need to love yourself, or that romantic love isn’t worth all the hype, or to love the whole world, or that love is all there is (although yes).

I want to be clear about something. I'm not saying that behind every fun, pretty, filtered picture on social media there's a darkness you don't know about, or a disappointment, or an unfulfilled life. I'm not saying that it's ALL a big ruse. I just saying it's mostly like that. I'm saying you should carefully consider what you're not seeing in those pictures. There's a smart saying in 12-step programs: don't compare your insides to someone else's outsides.

I’m sitting on the edge of my bed looking out at the bay, still in my work clothes. It’s Friday afternoon, Memorial Day weekend, and the sun is bouncing off all the roofs of the houses, the water, the docked boats bobbing in the bay. Even after living here for two years, the view still stuns me. The house sits on top of a steep row of houses, the highest on the street, and from this perch in my bedroom, the beauty is always so shocking I believe it washes away all that is wrong. How can a marriage break in the face of that view? How can there be any pain at all?

The truth was, I had no idea how to connect to men without it, and this was a big reason I kept doing it long after I knew I shouldn’t. For as long as I could remember the two things had been inextricably linked.

Three years ago when my husband moved out of our home, I couldn’t picture today’s scene. I hoped for peace, forgiveness, healing, but couldn’t have imagined the particulars: the specific smell of his apartment, piles of folded laundry I’ve never seen, the familiarity of his energy.