The Passing of 2009

Following are a few thing I will not be sorry to see passing out of my life with the year about to shed.

1. Fearing the IRS
2. The act of sneaking out the front door early on a Saturday or Sunday so as not to wake my sleeping husband and be forced to have a conversation I don't want to have
3. A car that smells like fish
4. Having to bear witness to angry fights on trains
5. Going to sleep in a rage with the person in the next room
6. The commute from E. 26th Street to W. 55th Street in Manhattan, particularly in the morning rush.

But no matter how thin you make a pancake, as the saying goes, it still has two sides. The following are a couple of items of beloved routine that I know I will miss with an ache that already hurts profoundly.

1. My husband's smell
2. The millions of pet names, nicknames, and variations of my name that he calls me; even the ones I thought I didn't like
3. The conversations we could have when he was his most vibrantly alive, funny, happy self
4. Summer weekends--start to finish
5. The way he loved to hear me sing
6. Being his wife.

Time goes on, and here again it goes. I will read this post a year from now, two years from now, ten. Bring on the miraculous, bring on the pains and the highs and the lows of being fully alive.

Blessings and love.

With So Many Things to Be Sad About

I am at such a weird, in-between place in leaving my union. There is no telling what emotion each moment will bring. Most of the time, it's fairly safe to say that I am cautiously optimistic, sometimes cautiously excited and even occasionally cautiously ecstatic, about having a life on my own again. I have no children. I have a job I enjoy, with an interesting future. SINGLE. Being single.

Everyone single cringes. Everyone married thinks, STOP.

We have all taken some gambles and maybe some of us have cut some corners from the "things I absolutely need in a partner" list. Ignored a couple of things.

Anyway. Earlier, I was having a perfectly singular moment that is going to go into the file I'll mark "breaking up memories" or something similar. Walking back to my sublet apartment I decided, against plan and against my husband's wishes, to spend another night here, instead of meeting him back at our apartment uptown. We exchanged a few emails. He was sad but resolute. I was sad and torn, unexpectedly: between the need to take rethink my plan in order to take care of him, and doing something painful that I knew would be better, in the long-term, for myself. I stayed at the sublet where I write this now.

There is something in the moment of choosing your own self-interest over that of someone you have come to know as HUSBAND that confirms for the soul, uniquely, that your couplehood is coming undone. You are unzipping. The seams aren't going to hold.

With so many things to be sad about, this feels to me like one of the saddest. It's something you have ultimately no control over. Your feelings are telling you what to do, and if you believe them, you can't go back. The seams split. This life you have made comes undone.

You start starting again.