A Year After My Divorce, I’m Wondering Who I Was
After the split, I found myself looking back on my life — and looking forward to who I’m becoming
“What were your top three achievements of the last year?” “List everything you accomplished in this decade!” I saw the tweets and didn’t know how to respond. The year and the decade took what had been the most important thing in my life with them.
A little more than a year ago, my marriage ended. My marriage of 13 years — dating for seven, engaged for two, married for four — just ended. I didn’t want it to. I’m not sure if he did either. But he told me, while we were sitting on a red couch shaped like lips in a hipster café in Paris, that he wasn’t happy, and that he wanted to try spending time apart. Apart? I said. Like a trial separation? Yes, he said. Of course I want to try counseling, he said. Of course, I said. The waitress came over and told us, while I tried to cry discreetly into my turtleneck, that there was a secret bar upstairs that you could get to by going behind a mirror at the end of the hallway. Tired by my efforts to cry discreetly, we went upstairs, and I washed my face in the bathroom, which, as it turned out, also secretly led to a separate room for smoking. I don’t know. It sounded good on Yelp. It was as good a place to end a marriage as any.
