With What I Have Left

I am alone at a Supercenter. You know, one of those big bright all American soul-sucks of a money pit where you can purchase both a decent bottle of wine and a small ceramic heater, plus maybe some of that primer I just ran out of, and oh! I need pullups for my youngest, too. And maybe some extra dark chocolate. Dark chocolate pairs well with some red wines. Doesn’t it? I came here to buy toilet paper.

As I am waiting to check out, I glance across the store and admire the flower section. A tall display of plastic covered sunflowers, wilting daises and purple orchids in all sorts of tiny colorful pots. No one has bought me flowers in a very, very long time. “That’s okay”, I think to myself as I roll my cart out across the hot asphalt towards my white beater, “but I wish I would have grabbed some of those potted red tulips”.

At home, I put the groceries away and empty the trash. Put the few dishes laying in the sink into the washer. This apartment isn’t much to look at. The round wooden table that used to be my grandmothers covered over the years in flour and dough and rolling pins or some southern fried dinner, usually enveloped in the warm laughter of my aunts and uncles, cousins, grandparents and friends, now sits alone in my tiny dining room. It’s blanketed with random papers, junk mail, sticky notes and receipts. I push them all off the edge into a cardboard box and throw the box into the hallway closet. Now the table is bare and empty and I feel like we, the table and I, understand each other. I feel sad about that. Those tulips may have perked both of us up.

Finished with my small list of distraction chores, I decide it’s time to get ready. I have a date tonight. It’s the first date I’ve been on since my whole life collapsed in the crumbling tower moment I will refer to eventually, hopefully, as the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Right now it feels like the worst thing.

I am never late to work, to a meeting, to a wedding, or to a funeral. But l am always late to dates. This date will be no exception. It feels better to accept that the lateness will happen, and that there’s no need to stress and rush around and make my face all red about it. I pull my dress up over my head and slowly step into the shower. The water is cold for a solid seven minutes before the heat begins slowly gaining momentum. I wait, leaning on the tile wall eager for the warmth to come.

My ex-husband would take showers for days if the hot water would last that long. I tried to love that about him, even though it was wasteful. The lengthy shower was wasteful but maybe the love was, too. This has become a daily practice. The constant remembering. The waiting for warmth. The accepting of slowness. I’m want to be here, now. I need to stay calm and grounded. I am desperate for space and comfort and clarity. But the shower takes too long to get hot, so I get frustrated, give up and get out.

In my walk in closet, wrapped in a large white bath sheet I received as a wedding gift in another lifetime, I soberly peruse through the few acceptable options for this evenings event. I want to feel pretty and I want to feel comfortable and somehow it always feels like those two things are mutually exclusive. As I flick through the hangers, my mind forms a column of pros and cons for each garment that grazes my fingers. This one is too heavy but it’s got all that amazing lace. This one is too thin and I’m already cold. This one is canary yellow, and not the right yellow for a crying redhead’s ruddy complexion. This one is comfortable and flattering but too short and I will surely, at some point in the evening, drop something and need to bend over to pick it up. I sigh. I’m tired. The short one it is.

I do what I can with my damp hair, too apathetic to go through the ordeal of drying, curling and styling, and skip ahead to the primer. My face is not something I find easy to look at anymore. It’s older than it’s ever been, weathered from the past two years of my near daily glass of wine and constant hysterical sobbing fits. It’s covered in pores that didn’t used to be so big, scars from the constant nervous skin picking. It’s always sad, often crying. I used to feel beautiful once upon a time. I slather the primer over the whole mess and cake on the foundation. That’s a little better, I think. I am unrecognizable to myself. Once my real face is satisfactorily hidden, I step back to take myself in. I inhale a deep heavy breath. It feels like I am always trying not to cry.

Divorce is similar to death in the way it steals you from yourself. You think you’re going to move on, feel better, be free, find the part of you that was neglected and buried under the last 10 years of your marriage to someone whose love was, apparently, conditional. That hasn’t happened to me yet. I moved out and I cried. Those two things, only. The rest of the grief process hasn’t shown up yet. Divorce is similar to death in the way it causes you grief. When someone dies, you can go to a funeral, mourn with your family or your friends, let it all out, be comforted and find some amount of solace in being held. It helps to know when you’re not alone in your grief. It helps to know that death happens to everyone, touches everyone and hurts everyone. It’s our shared and humorously unavoidable destiny. It’s the end of us all. No matter what choices we make in our lives, we all end up on the other side eventually.

When you get divorced there is no literal funeral. The mourning ritual after your divorce is your waking life. It’s the way you remember every day, when you look around your empty apartment at the take out boxes and random papers and beer cans and dirty laundry, that you used to be really, overwhelmingly happy. And now you’re just not. And you might never be again. Each day you wake into a haze of utter grief and obnoxious hopelessness, intrusive thoughts about what was and should have been, worries about your children and your future, a deep sense that you are unworthy of anything good and a heavy knowing of what it feels like to be absolutely alone. There is no formal ceremony intended to bring you closure. No one brings you a sympathy card, or a baked casserole, or a big sweet bear hug you can ugly-cry into. No one sends you flowers. I wish I had those stupid tulips.

In my kitchen, there are now two bottles of wine sitting bored on the countertop. They are two of my three only friends. One Jetbird Merlot and one Pet Name Syrah. How to choose which to open first? I study the Merlot. She is from the northern coast of California. I grew up some in California, before my mother one day packed up our gold VW Rabbit hatchback and drove my sister and me across the country to escape her own crumbling tower.

The bottle of Syrah tells me she’s from the Colombia Valley. Washington. That's where my very best friend lives, and where I have wanted to reside and raise my kids since before they were born. That will never happen now. I am in my ex-husbands hometown until our kids are grown. The loss of this freedom, the one where you get to live your life where and how you choose, goes against the most profound longing of every fiber in my body. This town is drinks up my tears through the cracks in its clay soil and it gives back very little. Nothing is abundant here. My work is accepting that I still have to wake up in the morning. I must do what I can with what I have left. So, I shove the Syrah back into the pantry. A place like Washington is nothing but an impossible dream. Merlot it shall be.

My singular precious life - everything I am capable of, everything I want, everything my soul needs, the tribe I haven’t yet found - has been forced by some fated karmic relationship to be concentrated into a very specific and tiny cluster of suburban towns in the middle of Texas. My potential is that of the grapevines growing in the Columbia Valley. They have no choice but to grow where they have been planted. And now I also have no choice. Being controlled in this acutely specific way, divorced yet still trapped, feels like being squashed by a giant. I am the pulverized ladybug on the underside of my ex-husband’s hiking boot.

Having decided the California wine may be somehow less emotionally painful to drink, I reach for last night’s wine glass. It's the only one I have left, the one my mom sent me for Christmas that reads “Treat Yo Elf” and depicts a little red and green puffy paint cartoon Santa on its side. It’s April but it doesn’t matter. As I lean over to reach for the wine, I clumsily stumble over the stinky bag of garbage on the kitchen floor that I have not yet taken to the dumpster. The glass flies out of my hand in slow motion across the room over the sink and slams into the clock on the wall shattering them both in a moment of blissful chaos, a loud pristine cacophony of chiming air born shards. Yet another huge injurious mess.

I stoically continue to hold in my tears, carefully step in between the broken pieces on the floor, and reach to grab a plastic kid’s cup decorated with blue and green dinosaurs from the cabinet. It’s small, so, fill it up to the top. A glass of Merlot is what I wanted. I had a glass, and now it’s broken. I broke it. And now all that’s left to fill up is a tiny plastic cup decorated with dinosaurs. This is a microcosm of my marriage.

I sit down on the couch next to my phone, dinosaur cup full of Merlot in hand, and queue up 2019’s Marriage Story. My dress hikes up too far. I am still cold. I pull on the corner of the afghan draped over the opposite side of the couch and snuggle up to it. I’m pretending it’s a dog or a man or a friend. I pick up my phone and dial Sam, the person who has saved me from destroying myself this past year by just being there on the other end of the line, listening. We’ve known each other since we were kids. He is now my very best friend.

I want to open up to love again. I want to open up to loving Sam, but he lives a bright life in the Colombia Valley, 2000 miles away from my heartache and my short dress and my sad face and my dinosaur cup that is now only half full of Merlot. The way we are together is so far apart. Somehow, though, he feels closer to me than anything or anyone else. Sam answers the phone with “Lights?” I respond “Camera.” He giggles “Action!”, and I smile and push play.