Elastically Kind, Internally Scorched
Divorce. The type of thing that you wake up at 1am every other night thinking “how did I get here?” for a few hours, ruining your chances at being social the next day(s). It’s like a neatly wrapped package where you carefully examine each and every mistake you ever made and then allocate it someplace. Assessing blame and punishment along the way, noting that on legal papers sometimes, but adhering it to your mind’s eye forever. The blame and punishment factors are simple in my case: I am responsible for all of it, so I take all the blame and punishment over and over again. And for me, I am doing all of this while fully understanding and coming to terms with the idea that I will likely never be married again in this lifetime-timeline. My one true marriage has come and gone. Through the infinite middle-of-the-night doom scrolling, I find comfort in a stupid Reddit note, but it still ain’t enough to get my eyes shut before 3:30am. It’s not like random internet strangers will change my reality, but maybe this post can help get me back to sleep tonight. Maybe I just need a water.
I’m in my mid-thirties and entering what I consider to be my “third-life”. I run my fingers over the horizontal scar lines on my wrists/arms underneath the tattoos and wonder if maybe all of this has been a dream since then, one that now has expired and needs to collapse on itself. Enough has happened. What more could possibly be next? Ah yes, there it is. My duty to be a great father. My duty to give and express my love as truly and authentically as I can. My unending pursuit of knowledge and lust for learning. The Sunday market flea finds. The hundreds of unnamed, undefined, and unannounced (yet existent) futures made just for me. Committing, deeply. Building skills that I actually care about. Exploring. Making ideas come to life. Oral surgery for this fucking tooth, probably. No amount of divorce paperwork making its way through the convoluted USPS mail system in a neatly packed manilla envelope can change that.
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