Chapter 14: The Beginning of the End

The days blurred together. I no longer felt time as a sequence of seasons or a progression of days into weeks into months. It was a Wednesday, the day I realized I was keeping time by arguments.

It was a Wednesday in 2014, the day I realized beyond all doubt I had made a colossal mistake.

"Hey," I opened, balancing on my customary eggshells, "I bought tickets to go to this seminar in a few weekends and I was just thinking how fun it might be if we went together! Would you have any interest in coming to this?"

The seminar was a talk being given by a famous spiritual teacher I was learning from at the time. I'll never forget the look on her face, when I asked her about joining me. Pity around the edges of her eyes, swirled with a revulsion that curled one side of her upper lip. She sucked in air as though about to explain something complex to a small child, but no sound came out.

She exhaled in exasperation, re-organizing her thoughts and simplifying them even further for the dim creature standing before her. "Yea, no... I just... I did the whole 'personal growth thing' back in my early thirties, ya know? I-- I'm good. You go though."

There are few moments in this life that I remember with photographic clarity. This moment is one of them.

I opened my mouth out of reflex, but no words would form.

As I stood in silent astonishment, at the threshold between the kitchen and the living room, I allowed the fullness of the moment to wash over me:

She's saying... she's done... growing?

I felt a thudding sensation in the pit of my stomach as something dropped. Who can say what it may have been. Maybe it was the other shoe. Whatever it was, though it dropped in the pit of my stomach, it somehow managed to hit me over the head. My vision became almost spherical in that moment.

I could see time.

Standing at the threshold between the kitchen and the living room of our beautiful, overpriced, basic suburban Los Angeles apartment, I saw us thirty years down the road, still arguing - only it was worse now, because our toxicity had been taught to our kids as well.

Suddenly, I was seven years old, crouched at the top of the stairs of my childhood home, listening to Mom and Dad argue in the kitchen. They should have ended it so much sooner than they did.

Then, just as abruptly, I'm back in our L.A. apartment, re-living in my inner vision the poisonous quilt of arguments we had woven together over the past two years. Sometimes I hear Mom's words coming out of my mouth, sometimes Dad's, sometimes my own.

The experience subsides as my vision refocuses back in the present... on that repulsed look... on my wife... on the life-sized problem I now see with crystalline clarity... and on the dawning realization of my only way forward.

I distinctly remember closing my hung-open mouth without a word. Silently, I nodded an acknowledgement that she had spoken an English sentence and I had understood it.

I turned and walked into our second bedroom - our home office - and silently closed the door, pre-turning the handle so as not to convey to her that I was upset.

I sat on the floor, then immediately stood up - too much energy for sitting. As I paced around the tiny room, I felt a searing truth arising within me: I will not continue this cycle. This ends with me.

It was a Wednesday, the day I realized I had to burn it all down.