Shadow Dance

I want a divorce.

There. I said it. Loudly, if only inside my head.

The walls have been closing in for a while now, and this thing has now become a choice between him and me, between my life and ours. The dogs are now barking, growling, gurgling; attacking each other again. I can hear them from my bathroom, where I have the door closed. I let their sounds become white noise to my drama. This bathroom is my tiny greenroom, and it allows me to find myself in the pupil of my eye before facing the world again. It allows me space and privacy to perform Kintsugi to my mind when it is shattered, like it is today.

I recall the last time I found myself locked in the bathroom about five months ago. It was worse then. I remember racking my brain for what he’d done, why I found myself in deafening and crippling numbness, searching for a way out. The way out. And I found a million things and no thing all at once. I wanted to become a dead leaf tumbling down the street in an autumn breeze: lifeless, unfeeling, one of many, gone. I wondered where he was and why he wasn’t helping me. I remembered knowing what he would say. Don’t be so weak. Pick yourself up. It is not my job to save you. Perhaps. One thing for certain was happening: I was coming to know that I had chosen incorrectly.

A picture on the wall of us with our dogs in the mountains during our first backpack triggers a domino effect of all the pleasant memories we’ve shared together. I look back into my mirror, leaning over my sink sprinkled with long, black dog hair that sometimes ends up under my teeth somehow.

It is in the difficult times that the person you choose to spend your life with matters. It is how they show up; it is whether they show up at all. It’s easy to experience the wonderful things in life—good food, a good Netflix show, standup comedy, going on adventures—but those experiences would probably be the same with millions of different people. The person next to you during the good times could be practically anyone. The important thing is how the person you choose comes to know your deepest vulnerabilities, and how the person you choose handles them.

He’s either too wrapped up in his own experience to notice or care about mine, or he’s exhausted from the years of upkeep of my emotions. He views himself as the janitor of my emotional life, and after ten years, he’s tired of it. The truth is he never really knew how to find my heart, much less console it. As a result, he never really did. His exhaustion baffles me.

I open the bathroom mirror and find the Valium the doctors prescribed me for some days-long dizzy episodes I had a couple of months ago. Quantity: 30. I had only taken one. How many would make me fall asleep in the warm shower and not wake up again? What if I chased them with the unopened bourbon we had in our liquor cabinet? How long would it take? Would I run out of hot water? What would he feel when he found me? I curl up on the blue bathroom rug I’d bought on Amazon years ago. Intense waves of overwhelming grief wash over me, and I cry so hard I can barely breathe. Then it subsides again and a stray tear or two are all to be found. These are the micro-seasons of my depression.

My thoughts had been so loud that I didn’t notice the dogs stop barking. They must be sleeping or eating something. Lately, one of our dogs has taken to eating my husband’s books. He even ate his journal. I don’t want that to happen again, but I can’t bring myself to open the bathroom door.

He’s running an errand; probably to that used record store over on the main drag. He loves that place. It’s an escape from this house and the dark cloud hanging over it for him. That dark cloud follows me wherever I go.

Most people I know would never suspect this of me, and would be surprised to know that I had a sharp knife pressed into my skin, parallel with the veins in my wrists, more than once. I was voted Best Personality in high school for my bubbly and ditzy nature. Always effervescent. I’d known this pain long before then. I found long ago that the brighter one is, the darker one can be.

I used to blame my darkness on my abortion, my miscarriage, my sister’s addiction(s), my rape in college, my father’s verbal abuse, my mother’s weakness, my best friend’s overdose (suicide), my repeatedly broken heart, the physical abuse I suffered at the hands of countless young men who grabbed my breasts and ran away down the hallway of my junior high before I could react, or some combination of the foregoing. I was only twelve. But it was long before these things that I knew this darkness. It used to be a monster with no face. In my womanhood, I have come to know it intimately. It is intertwined with my innermost being.

I pick myself up off the floor and look into the mirror again. My hair is disheveled and my teeth are bare, sharp and readied. I feel a fury echoing in my veins, millennia of suppression, entombed beneath the earth. This rage expresses itself in a roar from the root of my being. No more! I grip the sides of my sink with force. My pain and threatened life are his fault. I know it. I begin making plans for my exit and run for freedom. Anywhere but here. All I need is myself.

I take the strength I found in my intestines and pack my car, say goodbye to our Pyrenees rescue, Boris, and load our brown Labrador mix, Lowry, into my 2013 Forest Green 4Runner. It’s late fall and the decay of plant life fills the air, a musky sweetness foretelling the silence of winter ahead. I surmise that winter is filled with holidays to keep people from being driven mad by the silence of snow, death, and dormancy, a stillness that reveals inescapable interior truths. There must be distraction. We are never wanting for distraction. It surrounds us.

I am halfway out of the city now, headed toward the forest. As my elevation climbs, the temperature drops and evidence of recent wintry precipitation on the road calls on me to temper my speed. Every minute that passes after my departure from our home is accompanied by a growing weightlessness as I shed my anchor. I am free.

The base of the evergreens along the highway are blanketed by snow. Is it here already? The trees call me toward the forest. They are sirens of the winter. I want to get lost.

Lowry and I unload out of my 4Runner and prepare for a short hike. I didn’t bring my snow shoes and my feet sink 10 inches with every step I take, but I keep going. Lowry takes off to my right, down a slope toward a water source. He loves to swim. At all times. He bounds for the water and makes it there before I can call to him to come back.

Ponds tend to freeze over first in the winter. Even though it is small and frozen over, the ice on the pond is very thin. Lowry’s paws don’t have great traction on icy snow. He slides onto the pond and promptly goes through the ice. I run to him as he struggles to escape.

He was close enough to shore for me to pull him up. So much for our hike. We loaded ourselves back into my 4Runner. The exhilaration of his rescue exhausted me, and all I wanted was home, a fire, Boris, and even my husband.

As I pull into the driveway, I notice my husband is home. I don’t have the strength that I had when I left the first time. I park and open Lowry’s door. He runs to the backyard to be greeted by a very happy Boris, who thought we’d left forever. My husband comes out the backdoor. Our eyes meet.

I don’t say anything, so he does, with hope. “I got some fajita meat for dinner. Wanna grill?”

Though he wants to, he doesn’t ask me where I was. Boris lost his mind as Lowry approaches and all but barrels through the fence to get to his brother. My husband and I both laugh and a warmth washes over my body.

The episode in my bathroom no longer makes any sense. I am in a different world now. It feels as though I have amnesia, as though I exist in a rotating slideshow of alternating realities. What is real?

Maybe all of it. Maybe the seasons of life are as the seasons of the pond; ever-changing, ever-rotating, ever-freezing, ever-thawing, ever-coming, ever-going. Maybe I won’t know until I am dead. For now, I know I don’t want a divorce. Oops.

I smile at my husband and kiss him on the cheek on my way to change my clothes for a night of grilling, laughter, and listening to the Grateful Dead.