One Year Ago This Night

A year ago tonight I lived in the place that was my home for the last time.

It was exactly one year ago--the Tuesday before New Year's Eve--when my then-husband walked in what had been my front door for 17 years, and asked the un-askable.

He asked, Are we over?

Not exactly in those words, but that's what he meant.

First, my mind started racing. How do I answer this? Is there any answer that will stop the world from collapsing?

Then, Maybe it's time for the world to collapse.

It turned out to be exactly that.

Later, when I could think, I thought: When he walked in, it was still my front door. By the time I walked out, it no longer was.

It took me less than an hour to pack what I needed, I remember. But we both kept stopping to cry, so it took much longer. I couldn't find anything that my pillow would fit into, so I ended up hailing a cab on the corner of Second Avenue, sobbing, clutching my pillow under my arm like a third grader leaving summer camp with a bad case of homesickness.

Really the homesickness had set in before I even made it to the corner.

The taxi sailed through the darkness to the apartment I was subletting. I let myself in and realized that even that entryway had changed. This wasn't my front door, either. Up until that evening it had been my great escape--the place I could go to figure out what was going to happen next, what I was going to be capable of. Now there was a clock ticking. My home was no longer my home, and this sublet was a home with an imminent expiration date.

It felt like I had gone from having so many things that felt like mine, to having almost none.

Except the pillow, of course.

A year ago this night I was not sure I would physically survive the pain of it. Ironically I was actually in quite a bit of physical pain, in fact surgery was imminent, though I didn't know it at the time. That pain had become the back-seat driver that kept me company every minute of my life--I wasn't conscious of its maneuverings, only its chronic annoyance.

It was the hollowed-out throbbing in my stomach and my throat that I feared had become a permanent fixture--that was the pain I didn't think I could survive.

The truth is that it has lasted much longer, and hurt much more, than I would have wanted to know on that night a year ago.

I can still call it back in its full force. Sometimes I want nothing more than to swim in it, this pain. I know there's no escape, so I might as well soak. And I do. It can be intoxicating. These are the times I reach for it voluntarily.

Another way to call it back is to become entangled with the wrong men--wrong meaning men who will not be careful with me, men who are not good for me. It's not that I have a particular skill for this, I've come to realize. It's that, when you have the sharp memory of losing your front door and hailing a taxi on Second Avenue with your pillow under your arm, you forget that you need more than someone who will weigh you down, prevent you from floating away.

You do need something to weigh you down when you've lost every anchor that once kept your soul tethered to the earth.

This is not the only thing you need, however.

And a man who will weigh you down may not weigh you down with love. He might weigh you down with meanness, or with the fear of his own smallness--and so many other things. None of this is good.

But the pillow, the front door, seventeen years...you don't, you can't see this.

You can't see that it's OK to be flying wildly about the universe with nothing holding you down. You can't see that it will hurt, and it's OK that it will hurt. You will bump into people and grab onto them and lose hold, and this will hurt. I remember reading first-hand accounts of the tsunami in Indonesia and when all of this came about last year, thinking: Yes. Exactly. You try to grab hold, you're holding on with all of your strength, but your strength has never met anything like this.

All of this started a year ago tonight.

The people who love me tell me that I should be proud of how much I've done, how much I've lived and how much I've survived; that I've loved and lost and loved and lost again. And again, even.

I don't think I will be proud until I've mastered it, however. It's like dance: The learning is challenging, engrossing, it can be grueling. But until your body understands the choreography without your brain interfering, there is no real, lasting beauty. You haven't really earned the right to learn the next series of steps.

So that is the way I will look at my memory of that night, I believe--of the whole year that followed up until right now, actually. It was just the beginning of cutting away from the anchors that kept me safely tied to my old life.

I haven't got this mastered. But I'm getting pretty good at the steps.